Art in America articles from January 2003

Art in America archives from January 2003

Craft Museum picks architect. (Front Page).(Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) appoints Allied Works Architecture)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The newly named Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York, formerly the American Craft Museum, has selected Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Ore., to redesign a vacant 54,000-square-foot Edward Durell Stone building for its...

Moneo unveils RISD plan. (Front Page).(Jose Rafael Moneo; Rhode Island School of Design)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo was recently in New York to unveil his model for the Rhode Island School of Design's new RISD Center, which will house additional spaces for the RISD Museum. The $46-million expansion and renovation project,...

Grand piano design for Morgan library. (Front Page).(Renzo Piano)
January 1, 2003... Some 90 years after his death, Pierpont Morgan will have the posthumous distinction of joining John and Dominique de Menil, Ernst and Hildy Beyeler, and Gianni and Marella Agnelli on the list of patrons whose collections are displayed in...

New director for Albright-Knox. (Front Page).(Louis Grachos)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Louis Grachos, director of SITE Santa Fe since 1996, has been appointed director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. While at SITE, he curated shows by such artists as Pipilotti Rist, Alan Rath, Jim Hodges and Jose Bedia, and cocurated...

Art show for Arctic Circle. (Front Page).("The Snow Show" in Finland)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... A year from now, an ambitious inter national art and architecture exhibition, "The Snow Show," will take place in Finnish Lapland, in the towns of Rovaniemi and nearby Kemi; it is slated to open in late February 2004, and is expected to remain...

Big new art prize in Wales. (Front Page).(National Museum and Gallery in Cardiff, Wales' Artes Mundi Prize)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The National Museum and Gallery in Cardiff, Wales, recently announced the establishment of a major new art prize. With a biennial purse of 40,000 [pounds sterling] (approximately $62,200), the Artes Mundi Prize rivals those given by other...

Rough start, smooth finish at fall auctions. (Front Page).
January 1, 2003... Against the background of a shaky economy and trepidation about an impending war with Iraq, this autumn's evening auction series of big-ticket Impressionist, modern and contemporary works at New York's three major auction houses promised to be...

NY galleries.(Directory)
January 1, 2003... CHELSEA Marianne Boesky Gallery 535 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: 212.680.9889 Fax: 212.680.9897 Email: info@marianneboeskygallery.com Website: www.marianneboeskygallery.com Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 Opens...

Past perfect photos.(Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, by Lyle Rexer)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, by Lyle Rexer, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; 160 pages, $49.95. Reading the history of photography in the way it has largely been written, as a narrative of...

Urban expressionist: three area shows highlight a 35-year outpouring of exuberant, justice-haunted paintings and assemblages by the self-taught artist Purvis Young. (Report From Miami).
January 1, 2003... Purvis Young, whose 60th birthday has been marked with several local exhibitions, has lived all of his years in the shabby, lively streets of Overtown, a black neighborhood on the margin of downtown Miami and its opulent cluster of gleaming...

Manifesta 4: defining Europe? Acting more as facilitators than as curatorial stars, the organizers of last summer's Manifesta created an experimental visual forum--with mixed results. (Report From Frankfurt).
January 1, 2003... The fourth and latest edition of Manifesta, the itinerant pan-European biennial, took place this summer in Frankfurt, Germany. Capitalizing on its temporal overlap with and geographic proximity to Documenta XI in Kassel, Manifesta 4 achieved...

Ray, we hardly knew you: seven years after his death at the age of 67, the influential, enigmatic artist Ray Johnson is the subject of an absorbing documentary film. (Film).(Movie Review)
January 1, 2003... How to Draw a Bunny, the recent documentary about artist Ray Johnson, opens with the most dramatic, sensational event of Johnson's life--his 1995 suicide by drowning in Sag Harbor, N.Y. This was also the moment when his art began to achieve the...

Fabian Marcaccio: paintant's progress: the intersections of gestural abstraction and digital technology, politics and Eros, continue to fascinate this multimedium artist, whose most recent show included painting, sculpture and computer animation.
January 1, 2003... Fabian Marcaccio's recent exhibition at Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery in New York was titled "Janeila's 5 Moves," and the "moves" are relatively easy to enumerate: the first was a group of paintings, the second a freestanding sculpture, the third...

Dunham's demonology: the Carroll Dunham retrospective now on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York covers nearly two decades of paintings, from the artist's cartoonish abstractions of the 1980s to images of eyeless, top-hatted hooligans in his recent work.
January 1, 2003... For Carroll Dunham, painting's a killer. One of the recurrent characters in his works is, in fact, a murderous gunslinger at the ready, pistol pointed toward an unseen target outside the frame. The stiff hooligan hovering like God above the...

Trouble in paradise: several recent exhibitions, including a midcareer museum survey, revealed an acerbic undercurrent to the romanticized, semi-autobiographical works Jack Pierson has produced since the late 1980s.
January 1, 2003... At first, Jack Pierson's photos, drawings, sculptures and installations appear to be part of a quest for beauty, a beauty synonymous with sensual and visual pleasure, the by-product of an intensely hedonistic lifestyle. His colorful...

Chasseriau, in paint and in print: an ambitious and prolific painter until his death at 37, Theodore Chasseriau became a footnote to the history of 19th-century Orientalism. A Franco-American retrospective, the first in almost 70 years, brought the wider range of his work back into view.
January 1, 2003... With "Theodore Chasseriau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic," museums in Paris, Strasbourg and New York have staged the first retrospective since 1933 of one of the least known artists of the French canon. Precocious, at the age of 10...

Fabricating the here and now: in his recently exhibited steel-mesh works, executed in a quasi-Minimalist style, sculptor Win Knowlton introduces hints of "Nature" that prompt a heightened awareness of the world we inhabit.
January 1, 2003... Win Knowlton makes large objects that imply surrounding landscapes--not sylvan glades or sublime vistas, but sprawling, quasi-urban zones inhabited by utilitarian buildings and heavy machinery in various states of disrepair. In the late 1980s...

Winkfield's vocations: for a recent series of paintings, Trevor Winkfield took as his subject various fields of human endeavor, from ornithology to navigation to poetry. As is this artist's wont, the compositions are zany, enigmatic and disjunctive.
January 1, 2003... I once watched a pair of clowns hurry a donkey across Fifth Avenue. One clown was pushing the beast, and the other was pulling it. The two men held on so tightly that the trio's many-legged, three-headed movements appeared to be those of a...

Stitches in time: Oliver Herring's knitted sculptures and his stop-motion videos and photos might seem unrelated. In fact, the author argues, all result from cumulative processes in which stitches or frames mark time.("Split Reverse" video exhibition at Palm Beach ICA)
January 1, 2003... If you missed Oliver Herring's 1999 show at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, or if you saw only the main room of that exhibition, you got a surprise last winter at his new show in the same gallery, and you probably said: He's doing video? What...

Bill Viola at the Guggenheim Museum. (New York).("Going Forth by Day" video exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Going Forth by Day (2002), a title taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is an ambitious, digital-image installation by video artist Bill Viola. Commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Viola's newest cycle of birth, death and...

Ray Smith at Ramis Barquet. (New York).(painting exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Signaling a departure from his brand of magic realism, associated with his bicultural, Tex-Mex heritage, Ray Smith assembled an exhibition of computer-based works that revealed little connection to the figurative, often surreal paintings for...

Robert Longo at Metro Pictures. (New York).("Monsters" drawing exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Robert Longo's work is becoming increasingly introspective. Five years ago, the diaristic "Magellan" series featured several portraits of the artist's children among hundreds of drawings based on pop-culture imagery. Last year's "Freud...

Jacob El Hanani at Nicole Klagsbrun. (New York).(drawing exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Micrography has a rich tradition in Judaism, used either as decoration or for the transcription of holy texts, but Moroccan-born artist Jacob El Hanani embraces it for its own sake. His is a process-oriented type of drawing, as much about the...

David Sandlin at Gracie Mansion. (New York).(painting exhibition)
January 1, 2003... The main event in David Sandlin's recent show was an epic painting nearly 12 feet wide called Sorrow Falls... Joy Rises (2002). Indebted, Sandlin says in an interview in the exhibition's brochure, to the likes of Thomas Cole, this contemporary...

Yeardley Leonard at Dee/Glasoe. (New York).(painting exhibition)
January 1, 2003... In her previous show at this gallery, Yeardley Leonard exhibited a number of large horizontal paintings divided by lateral, multicolored bands of scumbled paint. These stripes of varying thicknesses nudged the representational, with hints of...

Glenn Goldberg at Charles Cowles. (New York).(drawing and painting exhibition)
January 1, 2003... The three large paintings and three smaller drawings (all 2002) that Glenn Goldberg recently exhibited offered a glimpse of the interesting turn his work has taken. For years, circle-based forms have appeared in Goldberg's canvases; often...

Miki Lee at Lyons Wier. (New York).(painting exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Korean-born Miki Lee takes the familiar trope of abstract stripe painting, adds to it her delight in color and embarks upon an obsessive and meditative art-making process. The resulting paintings are beautifully crafted and enormously fun to...

Antonio Petracca at Kim Foster. (New York).(World Trade Centre commemorative exhibition)
January 1, 2003... Since the mid-1990s, Antonio Petracca has been making paintings that bring the painted surface into "real" space, sometimes by using boxlike supports that protrude sculpturally from the wall, at other times displaying panels leaning on shelves...

Daniel Roth at Maccarone, Inc. (New York).
January 1, 2003... German artist Daniel Roth uses an array of mediums to elaborate mysterious, intricate narratives. In his recent show at Maccarone, Inc., Roth deployed drawing, photography, architectural interventions and constructed objects to tell the story...

Marjetica Potrc at Max Protetch. (New York).
January 1, 2003... As did her Hugo Boss Prize 2000 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum [see A.i.A., July '01], this show offered architecturally inspired projects by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc, as well as more than a dozen works on paper that also took the...

Bo Bartlett at P.P.O.W. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Bo Bartlett's exhibition of roughly 20 paintings plus watercolors and gouaches showed the artist continuing in the realist vein that has defined his practice for more than a decade. Entirely devoid of postmodern irony, Bartlett's work is...

Kumi Yamashita at Kent. (New York).
January 1, 2003... In her first New York solo show, Kumi Yamashita, a Japanese artist who has lived much of her life abroad and first came to the U.S. as a high-school exchange student in 1984, presented two distinct types of work. Close-up portraits of six...

John F. Simon Jr. at Sandra Gering. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Linoleum and Formica are materials more often associated with kitchens than with digital art projects, but they are the primary mediums used by computer-whiz John F. Simon Jr. in his witty second solo show at Sandra Gering. Best known for his...

Jim Hodges at CRG. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Nature was a quiet but ubiquitous presence that ran like a refrain throughout "this and this," Jim Hodges's recent solo exhibition. Hodges is known for transforming ordinary materials into poetic works that invoke life's preciousness and...

Peter Blake at Paul Morris. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Although his paintings and collages are essential to the history of British Pop, Peter Blake is more often celebrated for his cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, a kind of professional albatross that obscures a lifetime of engagement...

Dennis Adams at Kent. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Dennis Adams's color photographs depict the kind of airborne trash that is emblematic of big cities: tabloid newspapers and plastic grocery bags. The photos are large (most are 40 1/2 by 54 inches) and are laminated to metal support surfaces so...

Scott Peterman at Daniel Silverstein. (New York).
January 1, 2003... The sparse Maine landscapes in Scott Peterman's color photographs of ice-fishing shacks are static and silent, effectively conveying the experience of being alone in a vast and empty vista. These images are visceral and beautiful, but the...

Christopher Chiappa at Fredericks Freiser. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Conceptualist Christopher Chiappa belongs to the school of comedic one-liner artists that includes such talents as Maurizio Cattelan and Erwin Wurm. Chiappa often layers his visual puns, using video, photography, sculpture and digital...

Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Minneapolis-based photographer Paul Shambroom's latest New York show was titled "Meetings." Including eight large-scale, inkjet-on-canvas photographs, it documented town council meetings across the U.S. Although all the photographs depict...

Nancy Burson at Grey Art Gallery. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Missing child Etan Patz was six years old when he disappeared from the streets of SoHo in 1979, but five years later, artist Nancy Burson created a photograph of the lost boy as a 13-year-old, using her groundbreaking "aging" software, a...

Joanne Baldinger at Roger Smith. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Joanne Baldinger's previous show was at this gallery's project space in the Roger Smith Hotel's eighth-floor penthouse. There, small rectangular and square works on canvas and wood were hung amid homey stuffed furniture and bookshelves. The...

Pablo Vargas Lugo at Massimo Audiello. (New York).
January 1, 2003... The works of Mexican artist Pablo Vargas Lugo at first look like crisply delineated abstract paintings, somewhat similar to the works of Inka Essenhigh. Vargas Lugo, however, doesn't create his compositions with paint, but by cutting and...

John Hrehov at Denise Bibro. (New York).
January 1, 2003... John Hrehov's new work constitutes a considerable advance over his last show in New York, at Bibro in 2000. There, a "fearful symmetry," as William Blake phrased it, presided. Suburban Indiana housescapes and interiors (Hrehov teaches at Purdue...

Randy Wray at Derek Eller and Feature. (New York).
January 1, 2003... This spring Randy Wray's paintings and sculptures were on view in neighboring Chelsea galleries. At Derek Eller, Wray exhibited a group of seven medium-size canvases (all 2002) featuring broken webs, colored tangles and craggy silhouettes, as...

Julia Wachtel at Edward Thorp. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Julia Wachtel is one of a generation of artists, among them Troy Brauntuch and Sherrie Levine, who emerged around the time of Douglas Crimp's landmark "Pictures" show (1977). Newly armed with poststructuralism, they aimed the full critical...

Deborah Rosenthal at Bowery. (New York).
January 1, 2003... Deborah Rosenthal's fifth one-person show at Bowery was her best yet, and one of the most compelling shows by a living artist I have recently seen. Rosenthal is a painter of abstract figures. Adam and Eve, inspired originally by the Romanesque...

Michel Gerard at the Neuberger Museum. (Purchase, N.Y.).
January 1, 2003... "Michel Gerard: The American Decade 1989-1999" was a puzzling show, full of interesting works that seemed mostly unrelated. There were photos, drawings and sculptures; works presented on the walls or on the floor or hanging from the ceiling;...

Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau at Collaborative Concepts. (Beacon, N.Y.).
January 1, 2003... The goal of Susan Wilmarth-Rabineau's environment Reaching Into the Sky (2002) was to depict a forest through the course of a day, from the beginnings of dawn to the last light of the evening. Her large installation consisted of 16 columns made...

Harriet Matthews at Colby College Museum of Art. (Waterville, ME.).
January 1, 2003... A professor of art at Colby College since 1966, Harriet Matthews has distinguished herself as a sculptor with handsomely fabricated steel works. During a sabbatical spent on the island of Samos in 1987, she fell in love with the landscape and...

Robert ParkeHarrison at George Eastman House. (Rochester, N.Y.).
January 1, 2003... The eccentric character who inhabits Robert ParkeHarrison's photographs is none other than the artist himself. The American photographer designs and constructs the sets for his photo-based works, and then assumes the role of a heroic Everyman...

Ruth Laxson at Marcia Wood. (Atlanta).
January 1, 2003... Ruth Laxson considers her work "an attempt to restore some of the texture and grain of life being flattened by cyberspace." Her exhibition "<I>Visual Poetry / Paintings and Drawings<P>" explored both the concrete and abstract...

"In the Spirit of Martin" at the Bass Museum. (Miami Beach).
January 1, 2003... After yet another temporary closing for repairs of its new Arata Isosaki building, the Bass Museum re-opened in September with an exhibition of photographs, posters, paintings, drawings and sculpture documenting an era of shameful repression of...

Leslie Baum at Jan Cicero. (Chicago).
January 1, 2003... When Leslie Baum visits new places--Glasgow, Cordoba or Kew Gardens, for example--she responds to the forms, shapes and colors that she finds there. Collecting these visual materials in her mind--mundane details impress her more than do...

Janet Hamrick at Lemberg. (Ferndale, Mich.).
January 1, 2003... From a distance, Janet Hamrick's abstract paintings can look as if they were made of printed fabric; on closer examination it becomes clear that the artist's medium is oil on wood. Hamrick's linear patterns and swaths of color can suggest...

Robert Kushner at Bellas Artes. (Santa Fe).
January 1, 2003... Though a far cry from his mid-'70s performance pieces in outlandish edible vegetable costumes, Robert Kushner's ongoing body of work has sustained a seductive, idiosyncratic esthetic inspired by the organic world, A founder of the Pattern and...

Hideo Date at the Japanese American National Museum. (Los Angeles).
January 1, 2003... The small world of prewar modernism in Los Angeles was surprisingly rich. During the 1930s, Hideo Date (b. 1907) was one of a group of sophisticated Japanese-American figurative artists who--despite the racism of the times--managed to exhibit...

Kelly McLane at Angles. (Santa Monica).
January 1, 2003... Although there has been some buzz of late about young abstract painters in Los Angeles, much of the truly innovative new work has been figuratively based. Kelly McLane's quiet, finely tuned pencil drawings of off-kilter middle-American scenes...

Archie Rand at Villa Ronchi. (Crevalcore, Italy).
January 1, 2003... In 1970, Archie Rand was a 21-year-old painter fresh from studies at Pratt Institute. He was working as an assistant to Larry Poons and was immersed in the formal issues and technical processes of Color Field painting. He was also a talented...

Art schools. (Directory).(Directory)
January 1, 2003... NEW ENGLAND The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University Office of Admissions 700 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02215 617.585.6700 Fax: 617.437.1226 800.773.0494 Toll-free Web: www.aiboston.edu Professional college of visual arts...

Claude Closky at Jennifer Flay. (Paris).
January 1, 2003... If Claude Closky were not so busy cleverly dismantling the media machines, he would very likely be in charge of them. A one-man public-relations agency, the ubiquitous French artist has built his brand by slyly reworking advertising slogans,...

Art services. (Directory).(Directory)
January 1, 2003... 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 full color gallery...

Awards. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... American sculptor Richard Serra and British architect Norman Foster have been elected members of the Order of Merit for Science and Art, an honor given to scientists, scholars and artists by the German government. Fred Wilson, who will...

Roberto Matta, 1911-2002. (Artworld).(Obituary)
January 1, 2003... Matta, 91, painter who was the youngest member of the prewar Surrealist group in Paris and a key figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism in New York, died on Nov. 23 at a hospital near his home in Tarquinia, Italy, about 70 miles...

Obituaries. (Artworld).
January 1, 2003... Carole Kismaric, 60, photography book editor and curator, died Nov. 19 in New York of pancreatic cancer. She began her career in 1970 as a picture researcher for Time-Life Books, and later, as associate editor, helped develop its photography...

Corrections.(Correction Notice)
January 1, 2003... Nov, '02, p. 176: Our announcement of Russell Ferguson's appointment as deputy director and director of exhibitions and programs and chief curator at the UCLA Hammer Gallery was repeated from a much earlier issue, giving the false impression...

San Francisco art schools may merge. (Artworld).(San Francisco Art Institute and California College of Arts and Crafts )(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The boards of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) recently announced that they would begin exploring the possibility of forming a partnership. If the union is approved, the new institution...

Contemporary Art Museum. (People).(Paul Ha)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Paul Ha was recently named director of the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, replacing Betsy Millard, who retired in early June. Ha had served as deputy director of programs and external affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery since 2001...

Irish Museum of Modern Art. (People).(Enrique Juncosa replaces Declan McGonagle)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Enrique Juncosa, deputy director since 2000 of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, has assumed the post of director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. He replaces founding director Declan McGonagle, who resigned last April. Juncosa, who...

Haus der Kunst. (People).(Chris Dercon replaces Christoph Vitali)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Chris Dercon, artistic director of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam since 1996, has been appointed director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, replacing Christoph Vitali. Dercon assumes his new post in June.

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. (People).(Barbara Bloemink)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Barbara Bloemink, director of the Guggenheim and Hermitage Museum branches in Las Vegas, is the new curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.

Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. (People).(Massimiliano Gioni)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Massimiliano Gioni, art critic curator, has been named artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. The foundation begins its new contemporary exhibition program this spring.

Williams College Museum of Art. (People).(John Stomberg)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... John Stomberg has become associate director of administration and programs at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass. He was previously director of the Boston University Art Gallery.

San Diego Museum of Art. (People).(D. Scott Atkinson)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... D. Scott Atkinson has been appointed chief curator at the San Diego Museum of Art, a newly created position. He had served as the museum's curator of American art since 1997.

Eyebeam Atelier. (People).(Benjamin Weil)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... Benjamin Weil, new-media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the new curator at Eyebeam Atelier, an independent digital-arts center in New York that is in the process of renovating a facility in Chelsea, designed by Diller +...

Huang Yong Ping work banished in China. (Artworld).(Bat Project 2 removed from Guangzhou Triennial )
January 1, 2003... On Nov. 16, just two days before the opening of China's First Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art, foreign ministry officials completed the removal of Huang Yong Ping's Bat Project 2, a massive outdoor installation that, in its...