Art in America articles from June 2002

Art in America archives from June 2002

Former auction house chiefs sentenced. (Front Page).(A. Alfred Taubman, Diana D. Brooks)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Sotheby's former chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, and the company's former CEO, Diana D. Brooks, were sentenced in late April for their roles in the price-fixing conspiracy that has shaken the auction world during the past several years [see...

MOMA's new home in queens. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The Museum of Modern Art's new, temporary base in Long Island City, which has adopted the acronym MOMA QNS, debuts on June 29. Occupying the former Swingline staple factory, a vast industrial space located at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard,...

New Nevada Art Museum in progress. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno recently broke ground for its $15.5-million building designed by Arizona-based architect Will Bruder. Scheduled to open in March 2003, the 55,000-square-foot, four-level structure includes 13,000 square feet of...

Venice update. (Front Page).(exhibition program leaked to press)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... On May 2, one day before its scheduled submission to the governing board of the Venice Biennale, visual arts curator Francesco Bonami's preliminary program for the 2003 exhibition was outlined in the Italian daily La Repubblica. The document,...

La Dama of Park Avenue. (Front Page).(Manolo Valdes sculpture)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... A monumental bronze head more than 10 feet high, by Spanish artist Manolo Valdes, was recently installed in New York on the Park Avenue Mall at 57th Street. Under the auspices of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, in...

Internet boosts MOMA Atget photo sales. (Front Page).(Eugene Atget)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In the past year or so, the Web has taken a beating, particularly in the field of fine art, where many doubt its effectiveness as a sales tool for high-end works. One recent success story, however, has underscored the considerable potential of...

Brooklyn on the Seine. (Front Page).(Brooklyn, Paris exchange art)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... An international art swap is currently under way between 18 galleries in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (plus one in DUMBO) and the Marais quarter in Paris. Through late May and early June, galleries in Williamsburg are featuring works by...

Pritzker prize goes green. (Front Page).(awarded to Glenn Murcutt)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize, a $100,000 award given by the Hyatt Foundation, was recently presented to Australian Glenn Murcutt. Little known outside the architecture world, Murcutt, who is also a farmer, specializes in green, or...

American criticism and how it got that way.(Brushes with History: Writing on Art from The Nation, 1865-2001)(Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974)(M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism)
June 1, 2002... Brushes with History: Writing on Art from The Nation, 1865-2001, edited by Peter G. Meyer, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001; 531 pages, $19.95. Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, by Amy Newman, New York, Soho Press,...

Whither the Whitney Biennial? The restoration of a primary curator, a thematic framework and public art in Central Park were among the distinctive features of the cyclical show's latest edition. (Report from New York).(also includes sound art)
June 1, 2002... The first thing you saw at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, if you started at the top, was Ari Marcopoulos's big, color inkjet-printed photo-essay about snowboarders. Right in the center, and staring straight at you, was an especially cool-looking...

At play in the palace: the Palais de Tokyo, France's brash new antimuseum for the 21st century, presents the art of today--and tomorrow--as a continuous, ever-mutating event. (Report from Paris).
June 1, 2002... Amid great fanfare and some controversy, the Palais de Tokyo, billed as Paris's new "site for contemporary creation," opened to the public on Jan. 22. Established by the French ministry of culture and communication in 1999, it was realized in...

Watch on the Rhine: spurred by new museums and new directors, the Rhineland art scene is alive with fresh programming and energetic collectors. (Report from Germany).(Directory)
June 1, 2002... For all the hoopla with which Berlin is touted as Europe's new cultural center, seasoned art-watchers are still apt to go to the Rhineland to take the pulse of the German art scene. As one proceeds downstream from Bonn to Cologne to Dusseldorf,...

Bass forward: a lively group exhibition, featuring some 60 Miami-based artists, recently brought cross-cultural synergy to the newly expanded Bass Museum. (Report from Miami).
June 1, 2002... A Year ago, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach opened its handsome new addition by Arata Isosaki just long enough to display a scheduled traveling show of Russian vanguard art; then it closed to repair water damage sustained during...

Thomas Eakins: pictured lives: throughout his career, Eakins chose to paint individuals whose mastery of some skill, art or specialized knowledge defined their way of life. Opening in New York this month, a retrospective containing over 200 paintings and photographs reveals his own high achievement.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2002... For Thomas Eakins, the art of painting was first of all a set of difficult skills, which he used to celebrate those who had mastered some other art or craft or discipline. His first mature paintings, from 1871-74, show expert rowers at the oars...

The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon: in their first full-length interview ever, Bernd and Hilla Becher talk about the collaborative project that has occupied them for more than four decades: photographing and classifying the industrial structures that are even now vanishing from the modern landscape.(Interview)
June 1, 2002... Bernd and Hilla Becher have been making photographs together for over 40 years. Their black-and-white prints are almost exclusively concerned with nonarchitectural industrial constructions, the sort that are engineered rather than designed. By...

Fast and cool: a concise overview of high-concept objects dating from the mid-1960s to the present reintroduces New York audiences to an Italian contemporary who has pursued a formally independent--yet critically pertinent--artistic course.(Gianni Piacentino)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... With a 36-year career and more than 80 one-man and group exhibitions to his credit, Gianni Piacentino has been hidden in plain sight. His work resists simple categorization and all but invites misinterpretation, a circumstance that may in part...

Variety photoplays: several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late `90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures. Below, a look at five of these emergent image-makers.(Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan)
June 1, 2002... Launch Time When photographers Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan exhibited their prints in "Another Girl, Another Planet" at what was then called Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York in spring...

Philip Taaffe: found abstraction: drawing on sources from Art Nouveau to Abstract Expressionism to Op art, Taaffe produces a lush brand of pattern-based painting that is equal parts historicist satire and formal homage.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Philip Taaffe continues to make beautiful abstract paintings. His ambition has always been big: to build solid, architectonic wall decorations. That his more recent works often include clearly legible imagery, as well as the more ambiguous...

Bruce Nauman at Dia. (New York).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Called Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001, this recent DVD installation by Bruce Nauman is asking a lot of his fans, since it lasts an epic, Warholian 5 hours and 45 minutes, and fat chance that many of us are able or willing to...

Dan Graham at Marian Goodman. (New York).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The details of the two simultaneously screened films that constitute Dan Graham's Roll (1970, Super-8 enlarged to 16mm) aren't obvious at first. On repeated viewing, one film can be seen to focus on a man in a hunter-red shirt and wide-wale...

Annika Larsson at Andrea Rosen.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Two provocative 16-minute video projections by Annika Larsson, a Stockholm-born, Berlin-based artist, constituted her first U.S. solo. (Both were concurrently shown at London's ICA.) All Larsson's videos since 1998 have investigated...

Patty Chang at Jack Tilton/Anna Kustera.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Patty Chang's second solo exhibition at Tilton/Kustera is not as transgressive as her first, the images not as unsettling or ferocious, the humor not as biting and questions of identity, gender and sexuality, while ever present, have been toned...

Sarah Jones at Anton Kern.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In her second solo exhibition in New York, London-based artist Sarah Jones marshaled the intense light of studio fixtures to electrify her mostly preadolescent subjects, artlessly posed in an ordinary, cultivated landscape for the unflinching...

Seydou Keita at Sean Kelly.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Prior to 1991, when his images were included in the show "Africa Explores" at the Center for African Art in New York, Seydou Keita (1921-2001) was unknown in the U.S. Today his work is finally achieving the recognition that it deserves. ...

Monica Castillo at Robert Miller.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Monica Castillo spent the better part of the 1990s exploring the nuances of a single subject--her own face Over the course of the decade, she executed numerous self-portraits using a wide variety of materials, from the traditional (paint) to...

Clay Ketter at Sonnabend.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... If the home improvement guru Bob Vila were an artist, he might create works similar to the 10 painted reliefs in Clay Ketter's recent show at Sonnabend. Building his works from particle-board, steel beading and other construction materials,...

Nathan Slate Joseph at Sundaram Tagore.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Nathan Slate Joseph's work uniquely combines the large-scale exuberance of Abstract Expressionism with the laissez-faire mellowness of found-object art. He slathers pure pigment onto small square- and rectangle-shaped sheets of zinc-galvanized...

Carla Klein at Tanya Bonakdar.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Globalization is synonymous with airy modern airports bustling with travelers. When devoid of people, these enormous public spaces take on a character that can be both imposing and uncanny. In her second New York solo show, the Dutch...

Catherine Murphy at Lennon, Weinberg.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The eight paintings and three drawings in this show offered realist views of the artist's daily life through such mundane subjects as a pile of dust, leaves and pencil shavings swept into a mound on the floor, a planting of marigolds and a...

John Dilg at Luise Ross.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... John Dilg's paintings, friendly and a little earnest, profess the good-humored serenity of things intimately studied and attentively made. Essentially totemic, each of his images is the product of many drawings on a theme, finally abbreviated...

Shimon Attie at Jack Shainman.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Shimon Attie is perhaps best known for his public-art projects, in which he has projected archival photographs or written texts onto the facades of buildings in Berlin, New York and other cities. His recent show was an example of the more...

Jason Salavon at The Project.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In "Everything, All at Once," Jason Salavon's first solo show in New York, this veteran of the Whitney's "BitStreams" exhibition unambiguously establishes himself as a leading practitioner of the emerging genre of computer-based art. The...

Jerry Spagnoli at Edwynn Houk.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Jerry Spagnoli is foremost among a handful of contemporary daguerreotypists who have blown the flea-market dust off this earliest form of photography. Invented in the 1830s, the daguerreotype process of recording images on metal plates coated...

Ruth Bernhard at John Stevenson.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The 26 gelatin silver prints in this show dated from 1930 to 1976, the span of Ruth Bernhard's photographic work. Bernhard, who was born in Berlin in 1905 and has lived in the U.S. since 1927 and in San Francisco since 1953, continued to teach...

Duane Michals at Pace/MacGill.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Fed up with the pretentions of most blue-chip contemporary photography? Too big, over-praised, overpriced? So thinks Duane Michals. Michals, magician of achingly beautiful serial narrative--metaphysical, obliquely erotic meditations--has turned...

Renee Cox at Robert Miller.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Visitors to "American Family," Renee Cox's recent show at Robert Miller, entered the gallery to find themselves facing a row of three giant Cibachrome prints, each depicting Cox's toned, muscular torso tricked out in fetish gear (a black lace...

Eleanor Antin at Ronald Feldman.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... "The Last Days of Pompeii" (2001), Eleanor Antin's seductive series of 14 photo tableaux of debauchery and apocalypse, pays playful homage both to the extravagances of 19th-century Salon paintings (like Thomas Couture's Romans of the Decadence)...

Edward Burtynsky at Charles Cowles.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Edward Burtynsky's large-format color photographs briefly arrest irrevocable acts of destruction. In this 10-year survey, Burtynsky, a Toronto-based artist who will have his first retrospective exhibition at Canada's National Gallery next year,...

Joel Meyerowitz at Ariel Meyerowitz.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Renowned for his images of New York City street life as well as his lyrical studies of Cape Cod, Joel Meyerowitz recently presented a selection of never-before-seen cityscapes of Lower Manhattan that feature the now historic twin towers....

Tim Davis at Brent Sikkema.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... For his debut solo show, Tim Davis studied a bleak stretch of Florida landscape, an amalgam of strip malls and gas stations abutting a residential neighborhood which a clever real-estate developer dubbed "Hypoluxo Road." The photographs depict...

Billy Kluver at Sonnabend.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In 1960, curator Pontus Hulten, then director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet, asked an electrical engineer named Billy Kluver to assist Jean Tinguely in the creation of the artist's spectacular self-destructing machine sculpture for the garden...

Robert Lobe at the Katonah Museum. (Katonah, N.Y.).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Veteran New York-based sculptor Robert Lobe has found an ideal site for his art in the sculpture garden of the Katonah Museum (a cleanly elegant modernist structure designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1990). His recent exhibition there...

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey at the Gardner Museum. (Boston).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Last fall, British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey were in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where they were given full access to the museum's holdings, conservation staff and gardeners. The resulting installation,...

Glexis Novoa at the Miami Art Museum. (Miami).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Over the past decade or so, the Cuban-born artist Glexis Novoa, who now lives in Miami, has devised several ways of underpinning his considerable drawing and painting skills with conceptual strategies. In Cuba he did political critiques via...

Melanie Manchot at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. (Portland, Ore.).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Intimacy was the theme of London-based Melanie Manchot's engaging exhibition "Love Is a Stranger." The title derives from a 2001 video installation documenting her solicitation of kisses from people randomly encountered on the street, one of...

Ivan Morley at Frehrking Weisehofer. (Cologne).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Ivan Morley's complex, color-saturated paintings are visual extrapolations made within an associative game that starts with history. Born in Burbank, Calif. in the mid-1960s--seemingly a time and place of little history--Morley begins his work...

Charles Worthen at Gabriele Rivet. (Cologne).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... That Charles Worthen, an American artist who has been living in Cologne for 10 years, titled this exhibition "Recent Stuff" gives some inkling of the casualness, self-mockery and general humor that characterized the show. The title is also a...

Shirley Jaffe at Nathalie Obadia. (Paris).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Shirley Jaffe is an American painter who has lived in Paris for more than 50 years. Her work announces this trajectory. The abstract, suggestive forms of her paintings skitter between the world of flat, merry, Matisse-like cutouts and terser,...

Jacqueline Heer at Stockeregg. (Zurich).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... This show offered a small selection of works from the recently completed 20-piece series "Facing South" by the Swissborn, U.S.-based photographer Jacqueline Heer. Mounted behind Plexiglas and displayed without frames, the large-format color...

Guggenheim awards for 2002. (Artworld).(John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its fellowships for 2002. Awards totaling $6,750,000 were given to 184 artists, scholars and scientists. Artist recipients, including photographers and architects, are Brett Baker,...

Awards. (Artworld).(Brief Article)(Directory)
June 1, 2002... The New York-based American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the winners of its awards for 2002. Judy Pfaff received the $10,000 medal for sculpture, given every six years. Awards of $7,500 were given to Polly Apfelbaum, Mel Kendrick,...

Obituaries. (Art world).(Frank Moore)(Paul Georges)(Harvey Quaytman)(Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza)(Henk Geel)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
June 1, 2002... Frank Moore, 48, painter, died of AIDS on Apr. 21 in Manhattan. He is best known for his meticulously detailed, epic realist canvases packed with political content, for which he made frames that are integral to the work. He produced numerous...

Documenta 11 debuts. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The 11th edition of Documenta, the vast international art show that takes place at five-year intervals in Kassel, Germany, opens this month and runs all summer [June 8-Sept. 15]. Organized by artistic director Okwui Enwezor, in conjunction with...

New Cultural Complex for Beacon, N.Y. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Located about 60 miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley, the sleepy little town of Beacon, N.Y., may soon be a thriving art center. In 2000, the Dia Art Foundation announced that it would open a new museum there in a renovated...

Studio program looks back. (Artworld).(Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In May 2001, on the verge of ending its innovative free studio-space program for emerging artists, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation received a generous 11th-hour donation that allowed it to continue the program [see "Artworld," Sept. `01]....

New Museum of Contemporary Art. (People).(Dan Cameron appointed curator of Istanbul Bienniel)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, has been selected as curator of the eighth Istanbul Biennial, to take place September-November 2003.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. (People).(appointments)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... James T. Demetrion, recently retired director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is now serving as interim director of the Menil Collection in Houston. Ned Rifkin, former director of the Menil, left that museum to...

Yale University School of Art. (People).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Artist Peter Halley is the new director of graduate studies in the painting department at Yale University School of Art.

Permanent home for The Dinner Party. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The Brooklyn Museum of Art recently announced that it had received a gift of The Dinner Party, a spectacular and controversial installation piece by Judy Chicago. Presented to the museum by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, the gift is...