Art in America articles from June 2003

Art in America archives from June 2003

Venet and veracity. (Letters).(letter about Thomas McEvilley includes a reply from McEvilley)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... To the Editors: I formed my high regard for Thomas McEvilley's illuminating insights and solid scholarship when I read his "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: '"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art' at the Museum of modern Art in 1984," so I was...

Breton auction breaks records. (Front Page).(Surrealist Andre Breton's estate)
June 1, 2003... Latter-day and would-be Surrealists protesting the auction of more than 5,500 art works and collectibles from Andre Breton's estate set off stink bombs at one of the auction previews held in early April at the Hotel Drouot-Richelieu in Paris....

Cultural calamity in Iraq. (Front Page).(looting of Islamic antiquities during 2003 upheaval)
June 1, 2003... In anticipation of the looting and pillaging that often follow in the wake of a violent overthrow of authority, U.S.-led forces invading Baghdad in early April quickly secured the capital's oil ministry and its contents to prevent loss or theft...

New foundation for Venice. (Front Page).
June 1, 2003... New York- and Venice-based art dealer Emily Harvey has set up a new foundation in both cities that will mount exhibitions and offer residencies primarily to artists, writers and curators. Called the Emily Harvey Foundation, the project has been...

Facelift for Two Columbus Circle. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... The Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) recently revealed its plans for the makeover of Two Columbus Circle, a 1964 building designed by Edward Durell Stone as a home for Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, After the City of New York awarded...

Books for Chelsea. (Front Page).(new bookstore in New York named 192 Books)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... New York art dealer Paula Cooper has opened a new bookstore in Chelsea at 192 Tenth Ave., between 21st and 22nd Streets. The 700-square-foot store isn't the first bookstore in the Chelsea gallery district, but it is the first that isn't devoted...

Miami heat over expansion plan. (Front Page).(some locals oppose Miami Art Museum's rebuilding plans)
June 1, 2003... Over the past two and a half years, the Miami Art Museum (MAM) has built a firm foundation of local government support for its plan to construct a new, considerably larger facility and a 4-acre sculpture garden in Bicentennial Park, a rundown...

Who are the three? (Front Page).(news about an exhibition by art group The Three)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... You may think this is just a little Art in America news story, but it's really a work of art. If you don't believe me, visit the current Deitch Projects exhibition [May 22-June 28] by the British neo-conceptualist team known as The Three. There...

Art out of mind.(Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, by John M. MacGregor; The Art of Adolf Wolfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, by John M. MacGregor, New York, Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002; 736 pages, $85. The Art of Adolf Wolfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann, New York, American Folk Art...

Cinderella on the Hudson: ninety minutes north of Manhattan, the town of Beacon blooms with public art, galleries and projects as a branch of the Dia Art Foundation opens there. (Report From Beacon).(includes a list of galleries and addresses)
June 1, 2003... Once upon a time, when Hollywood scouts were seeking a grungy, run-down, postindustrial small town, they settled on Beacon, N.Y. "The trouble was," said mayor Clara Lou Gould recently, "the location scouts called on a Friday afternoon and we...

Dodgson in wonderland: a traveling show, currently at New York's ICP, and two new books revive the question of intent behind the photographic work of Lewis Carroll. (Photography).(Biography)
June 1, 2003... We might ask of the author and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) what the hookah-smoking caterpillar asked of Alice: "Who are you?" And if a traveling exhibition currently at the International Center of Photography in...

Roma renovatio: with a burst of museum construction, gallery inaugurations and government initiatives, the Eternal City makes its bid to become--once again--Italy's principal hub for contemporary art. (Report From Italy).
June 1, 2003... In recent years, Rome has enjoyed a remarkable renewal in the realm of contemporary art. Local and foreign dealers have opened new galleries, and established dealers have resumed or updated their exhibition programs. The city's collectors are...

Requiems for a lost future? Epic scale and forceful geometric forms have long preoccupied Al Held, perhaps nowhere more than in his "Requiem" and "Siena" paintings of the mid-1990s. Reacting to the debut of four of these works in New York, the author ponders the relationship of this "futuristic" esthetic to 19th-century landscape painting.
June 1, 2003... More than half a decade after they were completed, four monumental paintings by Al Held were finally unveiled last year at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. Held's interest in working on a large scale goes back to 1959 when he began the...

Sculpture as theater: with her recent, quasi-architectural sculptures functioning as video screens, Rosemarie Trockel presented at the Dia Center for the Arts a cohesive yet characteristically multifaceted exhibition.
June 1, 2003... A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways.--William Shakespeare Model: Book Rosemarie Trockel once described a book she envisioned that would reprint all of the articles written about her and her works, all of her own publications...

Julian LaVerdiere's imperial designs: with his first museum shows and a suite of new works recently unveiled in Chelsea, Julian LaVerdiere has taken on themes of global power using a signature blend of the retro, the high tech and the frankly spectacular.(Biography)
June 1, 2003... When Adenoid Hynkel, Charlie Chaplin's parodic Fuhrer, frolics with a buoyant globe in The Great Dictator (1940), when General Buck Turgidson advocates preemptive nuclear annihilation beneath blinking lights tracking the progress of B-52s to...

Yun-Fei Ji: moral vistas: the New York-based Chinese painter presents densely figured landscapes and interiors as a form of social critique.(Biography)
June 1, 2003... Yun-Fei Ji's artistic project, driven by a deep ethical impulse, is centered on tightly packed ink-and-pigment scenes on paper, populated by often disturbing, sometimes raunchy historical and allegorical figures. Large multiple-view works like...

Gego's galaxies: setting free the line: though born in Europe, Venezuelan artist Gertrude Goldschmidt--known as Gego--created a body of highly refined abstract work that, by its formal rigor and uncanny inventiveness, places her firmly at the forefront of South American modernism.
June 1, 2003... Fridamania has peaked. With the success of Julie Taymor's relentlessly colorful biopic devoted to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), this once underrated painter has now become a refurbished symbol of the romantic artist, a feminist...

Trenton Doyle Hancock: full immersion: wallpaper, paintings, murals, drawings and hand-lettered wall texts all enter into the mix of this Texas artist's exuberantly satiric gallery environments--shown recently in New York and now on view at MOCA in North Miami.
June 1, 2003... Behold a welter of words woven into imagery dense as kudzu. Enter into a personal mythology of mind-frying elaboration, featuring chain-gang-striped "mound people" with grotesque, creepy-cartoon heads. Drawings compete with wallpaper, paintings...

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle at Max Protetch.(a show by the multimedia artist)
June 1, 2003... Lovely, lonely clouds have wandered across the field of contemporary art recently. Last summer, to derive architecture from atmosphere, the facade of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio's Blur Building projected lake water through scores of...

Gary Simmons at the Studio Museum in Harlem.(a showing of "erasure" drawings)
June 1, 2003... This exhibition, Gary Simmons's first U.S. museum survey, featured 37 works produced over the past seven years. Curated by Thelma Golden, the show was co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,...

Beverly Semmes at Leslie Tonkonow.(art installation at Tonkonow gallery)
June 1, 2003... Though the proportions of Beverly Semmes's early dress-shaped sculptures were extreme--skirts and sleeves tended to spill from wall to floor and gather there in vast floods of taffeta or velvet--she has long since outgrown them. In her...

Dona Nelson at Cheim & Read.(gallery showing of paintings)
June 1, 2003... Dona Nelson has chosen an interesting moment in her career to cut back against the stylistic grain. Her last show at Cheim & Read, "The Stations of the Subway," suggested that a geometric classicism might be emerging from her process-intensive...

Emily Mason at David Findlay Jr.(gallery showing of paintings)
June 1, 2003... Those suffering from chromophobia should steer clear of Emily Mason's luminous abstractions in oil. Partial to extravagant, close harmonies, she abuts intense magentas and blood oranges, pale violets and deep yellows, often adding a light green...

Jenny Hankwitz at Cheryl Pelavin.(showing of paintings)
June 1, 2003... In Jenny Hankwitz's riotous large-scale paintings, flat vivid colors and explosive splash patterns bound and swirl, slipping giddily toward the edges as if daring the canvas to contain them. Many of the 14 oil paintings in her third solo show...

Robert Colescott at Phyllis Kind.(modern painting exhibition)
June 1, 2003... The parody in Robert Colescott's early "history" paintings, such as his send-up of Emanuel Leutze's icon, recast as George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), was explicit and, with its lumpy modeling, deliberately heavy-handed. By...

Paul Ramirez Jonas at LFL.(LFL Gallery, New York)("The Earth Seen from Above" exhibition)
June 1, 2003... "The Earth Seen from Above" was the telling title of Paul Ramirez Jonas's first New York solo show in six years. A postcolonial take on politics, space travel and global exploration, it came at a timely juncture--the impending war with Iraq and...

Viola Frey at Nancy Hoffman.(ceramic figures at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York)
June 1, 2003... Although Viola Frey's ceramic figures are monumental in scale, they don't have a monumental effect. Rather, these people appear beaten-down, passive or impotent. Constructed in several sections, fired separately and then joined, the sculptures...

Matthew Northridge at Gorney Bravin + Lee.("Continent "exhiibition of sculpture and collage)
June 1, 2003... Delivering on the promise of New City, a sprawling metropolis of a sculpture displayed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2002, Matthew Northridge presented three sculptures and 21 collages in his impressive solo debut....

Anthony Caro at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.(sculpture exhibition)
June 1, 2003... Anthony Caro's figurative bronzes of the early 1950s recall his academic training and his association with Henry Moore. While he is best known for his abstract welded-metal structures with painted surfaces, which dominated his oeuvre for some...

Al Held and George Sugarman at Washburn.
June 1, 2003... This visual dialogue between two artist friends, George Sugarman (1912-1999) and Al Held, encapsulated a specific New York moment. Exhibited in a single room were five Helds--four small paintings (about 19 by 24 inches) and one midsize (50 by...

Jean-Marc Bustamante at Matthew Marks.(photography and sculpture exhibition)
June 1, 2003... Jean-Marc Bustamante, who will represent France in this year's Venice Biennale, recently exhibited nine enormous photographs and 10 sculptures at Matthew Marks. The show was a hodgepodge of objects taken from a variety of series that he's been...

Nina Katchadourian at Debs & Co.(multimedia presention of three bodies of work including photography and video)
June 1, 2003... Nina Katchadourian's recent solo was a suberb multimedium presentation of three bodies of work. One series recalls the artist's "Mended Spiderwebs" of 1999, insofar as it maintains her interest in small, unexotic creatures, in this instance a...

Christopher Williams at David Zwirner.(photography exhibition)
June 1, 2003... This discursive survey represented Christopher Williams's idea-based photographic production in two series of works, through the lens of his politically charged "Angola to Vietnam*" series (1989) and in the broader embrace of an ongoing series...

Carrie Mae Weems at P.P.O.W.(P.P.O.W Gallery (Pilkington-Olsoff Fine Arts, Inc.), New York)
June 1, 2003... With her new work in photography and--for the first time--film, Carrie Mae Weems continues to help recenter American and Caribbean social history by finding middle-class black experience in its mainstream. "May Days Long Forgotten" is a suite...

Shahzia Sikander at Brent Sikkema.(Pakistani-American artist exhibition, New York)
June 1, 2003... In her first show at the Brent Sikkema Gallery, Shahzia Sikander, best known for her unconventional application of traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting techniques, continued her subversive and witty cross-cultural dialogue. A pair of...

Judith Schaechter at Claire Oliver.(Extra Virgin exhibition)
June 1, 2003... In her latest exhibition, titled "Extra Virgin," Philadelphia artist Judith Schaechter offered an unusual and provocative mix of the sacred and the profane. The sacred is represented through the medium of stained glass; panels were mounted on...

Elena Berriolo at Lo Spazio.
June 1, 2003... Elena Berriolo is primarily known for her plush sculptures made of brocaded fabric fitted around underlying wooden structures. Rooted in pared-down abstraction, these works also suggest looming theatrical props; eccentric, to the point of...

Raymond Pettibon at Zwirner & Wirth and David Zwirner.(two exhibitions of Pettibon's drawings)
June 1, 2003... These two exhibitions offered samplings from distinct phases of Raymond Pettibon's immense body of work. The show at Zwirner & Wirth began with a cross section of "classic" Pettibons from the early 1980s: black-and-white, single-frame cartoons...

Fausto Melotti at Leo Castelli.
June 1, 2003... Italian modernist Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) is known primarily for the abstract sculptures he began creating in the 1930s. These elegantly diminutive, finely wrought sculptures employ curved, flat and linear shapes that perch upon thin metal...

Lois Dodd at .(Windows and Doorways at Alexandre Gallery, New York)
June 1, 2003... Lois Dodd came to artistic maturity among that group of American artists commonly known as the painterly realists, including Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher and Nell Welliver. At 75, Dodd's gift and grace show no sign of lagging, and this was a show...

Guo Brothers at Goedhuis Contemporary.
June 1, 2003... Guo Wei and Guo Jin, born in 1960 and 1964, respectively, come from Chengdu, a city in southwest China; both were educated at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing. They are leading members of a group of Sichuan artists who have been at...

Rolf Belgum at The Proposition.(Love Letters from a Fox Terrier)
June 1, 2003... Rolf Belgum's recent exhibition "Love Letters from a Fox Terrier" explored the themes of psychosis and obsession in two unlikely subjects: Belgum's close friend Dan Cleveland, and the artist's dog, Jacques. In the large front room of the...

Hector Leonardi at the Viewing Gallery.
June 1, 2003... There is nothing more thrilling than seeing an artist at age 70 enter new territory without batting an eye. Those who had the pleasure of seeing Hector Leonardi's last two exhibitions at Robert Steele Gallery knew that something was changing....

Laurie Fendrich at Gary Snyder.
June 1, 2003... Laurie Fendrich's whimsical paintings maintain an unmistakable dialogue with high modernist abstraction, with nods to Russian Constructivism, Stuart Davis and even, perhaps, Alfred Jensen. However, they are anything but museum pieces. Instead,...

Phil Binaco at Linda Durham.
June 1, 2003... Across the surface of Phil Binaco's "Maenads Paintings," 12 monochromatic 30-inch-square panels of natural and synthetic resin, are delicately etched vertical lines, broken in places to accent their rhythm with rectilinear voids. The lines have...

Suzanne Caporael at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren.
June 1, 2003... Called "Littoral Drift," Suzanne Caporael's handsome show of variously sized oil paintings was inspired by the Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe. These 13 abstract paintings, all from 2002, are named...

Hwang Young Sung and Bae Young Jin at Parsons School of Design.
June 1, 2003... Merging tradition with modernism, and art with craft, Korean artist Hwang Young Sung and clothing designer Bae Young Jin joined forces recently in a collaborative show at Parsons School of Design. The senior Hwang (b. 1941) contributed...

Howard Clifford at the Farnsworth Art Museum.
June 1, 2003... In 1998, friends and acquaintances of the artist Howard Clifford began to receive large handmade postcards in the mail soliciting patronage. "If you would like a modernist painting, driven by faith, or a postmodern painting, driven by reason,"...

Alyson Weege at Gallery K.
June 1, 2003... The 15 recent oil paintings in this show by Alyson Weege varied in composition, subject and intention, From the darkling, trompe l'oeil still lifes to the surreal set pieces to the intense portraits, the exhibition held my attention for a long...

Andrew Young at Zolla/Lieberman.
June 1, 2003... Andrew Young's collages fall into two groups: those that are mainly abstract shapes made of subtly hand-colored papers with simple geometric forms painted on top, and those that, in addition, contain painted images. By rubbing dry ground...

Tony Hepburn at Revolution.(32 years of work represented)
June 1, 2003... In an exhibition that spanned 32 years of art practice, "Tony Hepburn @ 60" revealed an artist speculating on transience and place, distilling the essence of location and relocation through physical objects. As he has moved among different...

Alison Saar at Jan Baum.
June 1, 2003... Alison Saar's solidly muscular figures belong to the present, while embodying legacies that stretch deep into the past--the formal inheritance of African sculpture, African-American spiritual traditions of the south, the psychic scars and...

Manuel Neri at Hackett-Freedman.
June 1, 2003... Manuel Neri's career-long focus on the solitary female form was fully evident in this compact survey gleaned from a decade's worth of work. Of the 15 sculptures and five mixed-medium works on paper that comprised the show, the most ambitious...

Paul Pratchenko at Braunstein/Quay.
June 1, 2003... The virtues of having a light touch in troubled times are celebrated in Paul Pratchenko's recent series of acrylic-on-canvas paintings and works on paper. Each of these modestly scaled works is a magic-realist portrayal of a protagonist or...

Manuel Ocampo at Paule Anglim.
June 1, 2003... There were nine new paintings in Manuel Ocampo's recent exhibition, and the majority were painted in a ghostly aqua-tinged grisaille that conveys a dreamy and introspective reticence. As with the artist's more expressionistic earlier work,...

David Brody at Esther Claypool.
June 1, 2003... Though viewers should be warned about the "adult" nature of David Brody's subject matter, his sexually explicit paintings conjure the polymorphous perversity of the child. Brody depicts imaginary gratification objects that consist of...

Michael Landy at Maureen Paley Interim Art.
June 1, 2003... Michael Landy won extensive public and media attention in 2001 with Break Down, his installation at the former C&A department store in London's Oxford Street. For two weeks, Landy publicly destroyed all his worldly possessions--including his...

James Bishop and Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Annemarie Verna.
June 1, 2003... Announced as a two-person retrospective, this show featured a selection of works plucked from the artists' respective oeuvres between the years 1969 and 2002. Most of Sylvia Plimack Mangold's paintings here are of trees near her home, The most...

Ann Veronica Janssens at Schipper & Krome.
June 1, 2003... Setting off fireworks seems to be an inalienable civil right in Germany, one exercised with alarming enthusiasm around the New Year holidays on Berlin's streets, where the idle stroller quickly learns to run a frenzied gauntlet of explosions...

Anna Jermolaewa at Johann Koenig.
June 1, 2003... Anna Jermolaewa is not exactly gun-shy. In her two-screen video Shooting (2001)--one of four video loops in her first solo show at Johann Koenig--the artist is seen coolly aiming an automatic pistol in what looks like an underground firing...

Marja Helander at Hippolyte.
June 1, 2003... At first glance, Marja Helander's photographs seem to be straightforward images of landscapes and interior scenes. But beneath the surface is a dialogue of disparate cultures and, perhaps, reconciliation. For the recent series, "Modern Nomads,"...

Art services. (Directory).(Directory)
June 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...

Utzon wins Pritzker Prize. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Danish architect Jorn Utzon is the winner of the $100,000 Pritzker Prize for 2003, given by the Hyatt Foundation. Utzon's best-known building is the distinctive Sydney Opera House, commissioned in 1961 and completed in 1976. Due to construction...

Dahesh Museum. (People).(Peter Trippi is appointed new director)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Peter Trippi is the new director of the Dahesh Museum in New York, which will reopen in the former IBM Gallery space on 57th Street in September. Since 1998, he had been assistant vice director for development at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

New Museum of Contemporary Art. (People).
June 1, 2003... The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York has named Lisa Roumell as its new deputy director. Formerly a partner in a private equity investment firm, she will help oversee the museum's building and relocation project. Roumell replaces...

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. (People).(Robert Futernick replaces Steven A. Nash as Chair of the Conservation Department)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Robert Futernick, chair of the conservation department at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, was recently promoted to the position of associate director of the museums. He replaces Steven A. Nash, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in...

Museum of Art and History. (People).(McPherson Center, Santa Cruz)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Paul Figueroa, executive director at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., has been named executive director at the Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center in Santa Cruz. He replaces Charles Hilger who retires this month.

Milwaukee Art Museum. (People).(Stefano Basilico appointed adjunct curator of contemporary art)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Former New York art dealer Stefano Basilico has been appointed adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He will be based in New York, and will continue to serve as curator of the art collection at the New School...

Historical Society of Greenwich. (People).(Grady Turner appointed curator)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Grady Turner, A.i.A. contributor and former director of exhibitions at the Museum of Sex in New York, was recently named curator of the Historical Society of Greenwich, Conn.

Awards. (Artworld).(art awards)
June 1, 2003... President Bush recently announced nine recipients of National Medals of Arts, the highest honor for the arts in the U.S. Among them are Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello, the late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, painter and stage...

Grants. (Artworld).(John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced 184 recipients of its fellowship awards for 2003. Artists, scholars and scientists received grants totaling $6.75 million. The artist recipients are Judith F. Baca, Zoe Beloff, Joann...

Obituaries.(Robert Blackburn, Jorge Oteiza, Whitney Stoddard)(Obituary)
June 1, 2003... Robert Blackburn, 82, artist, teacher and master printmaker, died Apr. 21 in New York. The Harlem-born artist is best known for his pioneering contributions to the development of abstract color lithography, and for establishing in New York, in...

WTC memorial competition. (Artworld).(World Trade Center site memorial)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... After much anticipation, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has announced an international competition for a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Anyone 18 years or older may enter for a $25 fee. Guidelines stipulate that each...

New Saatchi Gallery on the Thames. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... London's Saatchi Gallery, founded by former advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, reopened on Apr. 17 in elegant new digs on the South Bank [see "Front Page," Mar. '02]. The privately funded facility occupies 40,000 square feet on the ground floor...

A Guggenheim for Brazil. (Artworld).
June 1, 2003... Hoping for the same bounce from Jean Nouvel's partly underwater museum that Bilbao received from Frank Gehry's titanium tourist magnet, Mayor Cesar Maia of Rio de Janeiro signed an agreement in New York on Apr. 30 for the development of a...

Hadid building opens in Cincinnati. (Artworld).(Contemporary Arts Center, designed by Zaha Hadid, is first art museum in country designed by a woman)
June 1, 2003... On June 7, the Contemporary Arts Center opens its new $34-million building in downtown Cincinnati. Designed by Zaha Hadid, it is the architect's first project in the U.S. and the first art museum in the country designed by a woman. The...

Whitney cancels expansion plans. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... New York's Whitney Museum of American Art has joined the growing list of museums around the country that have postponed or canceled construction projects due to the economic downturn. Two years ago, the Whitney hired prominent Dutch architect...