Art in America articles from June 2007

Art in America archives from June 2007

Disputed O'Keeffe sale in Nashville.(Front Page)(Georgia O'Keeffe painting)
June 1, 2007... Nashville's Fisk University has been embroiled in a legal battle with Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum over the school's attempt to sell a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, Radiator Building--Night, New York (1927) from its Stieglitz Collection,...

Summer art: the-grand tour.(Front Page)(Calendar)
June 1, 2007... In a once-a-decade astral alignment, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel (which is presented every five years) and Skulptur Projekte Munster (every ten years) will all run this summer, along with the annual Art Basel. The Venice...

Return of The Wall.(Front Page)(Forrest Myers)
June 1, 2007... Ten years and an eyesore later, a compromise has been reached that will see the return of Forrest Myers's 1972 public artwork, The Wall, but now accompanied by advertising. Prominently located on the side of 599 Broadway, at the bustling...

Alice Neel on film: a family affair.(FRONT PAGE)
June 1, 2007... Alice Neel, a new documentary film by Andrew Neel, the artist's grandson, tells the story of a dysfunctionnal family whose central figure was often emotionally unstable and wracked by impossibly high ideals. Neel was at one point suicidal and...

Seattle Museum expands.(Front Page)
June 1, 2007... The Seattle Art Museum's downtown location reopened on May 5 with a new building designed by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Cloepfil's understated modernist building, which doubles the size of the museum, was...

Art cologne transplanted to spring.(Front Page)(Calendar)
June 1, 2007... After 41 years as a fall attraction, Art Cologne, one of Europe's largest and most respected art fairs focused on modern and contemporary works, has moved to the spring [see "Front Page," Oct. '06].The fair's organizers, led by director Gerard...

Artful follies in the Persian Gulf.(Front Page)
June 1, 2007... On Mar. 6, just a day before the opening preview of the inaugural Gulf Art Fair in Dubai (Mar. 8-10), a group of art hacks was driven to the neighboring gulf state of Abu Dhabi, where no fewer than five major museums, among them, inevitably, a...

Back to square one: remembering Sol LeWitt (1928-2007).(Front Page)(In memoriam)
June 1, 2007... After six years of fighting cancer with unexpected success, Sol LeWitt died on April 8th at New York Hospital, age 78. He finished his last drawing less than four days earlier. His death leaves a huge void in the world of art and among his...

Santa Fe: summer preview.(art)
June 1, 2007... Over the past 10 years, Santa Fe has witnessed an extraordinary growth across its cultural landscape, the preponderance of which has been in the field of visual arts. Much of this transformation has been the direct result of the founding of...

Women and the Land.(Alice Aycock; Mary Miss; Patricia Johanson)
June 1, 2007... Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects, by Robert Hobbs, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2005; 423 pages, $50. Mary Miss, texts by Mary Miss, essays by Daniel M. Abramson, Joseph Giovannini, Eleanor Heartney and Sandro Marpillero, New York,...

Feminism's long March.(books)(After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art)(Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words)(Critical essay)
June 1, 2007... After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, with a forward by Linda Nochlin, Munich, Prestel, 2007; 320 pages, $39.95. Contemporary British Women...

No regrets: an art critic looks back on the hard-won achievements of feminist art and the current state of its legacy.(Issues & Commentary)(Speech)
June 1, 2007... The following is the text of the keynote talk that opened the Museum of Modern Art's symposium "The Feminist Future" [Jan. 26-27], revised for a lecture during the "WACK!" show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in April, and...

Girls, girls, girls: feminist art's phases and philosophies? Let me count the ways ...(Feminist Group Shows)(Calendar)
June 1, 2007... The wave of solo exhibitions, group shows, surveys and museum projects of gynocentric art that has surged across the country in recent months is not a unified tide. These events are characterized by different levels of scholarship, ambition,...

How Chinese is it? A newly refurbished--and now nominally "Asian"--National Palace Museum recently mounted a landmark Song Dynasty show.(Report from Taipei I)
June 1, 2007... For more than half a century, since Chiang Kaishek carried off nearly 3,000 crates of choice treasures from Beijing's imperial art holdings, Taiwan has served as custodian of the world's finest collection of Chinese art and antiquities. But in...

The blurennial: in the fifth Taipei Biennial, 34 international artists and groups presented work under the enigmatic rubric "Dirty Yoga.".(Report from Taipei II)
June 1, 2007... Here's a refreshing idea. While other cities around the world compete to produce the most comprehensive, satellite-show-larded art extravaganzas imaginable, Taipei has been content, for the last eight years, to offer modest, serf-contained...

NY Galleries.(New York)(Directory)(Calendar)
June 1, 2007... CHELSEA Aperture Gallery 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.505.5555 Fax: 212.505.7527 Email: publicity@aperture.org Web site: www.aperture.org Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 Through...

Feminism unbound: "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" revisits a tumultuous and enormously productive era, presenting a wealth of artwork made by women in the late 1960s and '70s.
June 1, 2007... One big question raised by the tsunami of exhibitions, symposia and books that have made 2007 a banner year for feminism in the visual arts is, why now? While it is, stunningly, true that the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of State and the...

Worldwide women: curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, "Global Feminisms" explores the range of artworks being made internationally by women born since 1960--and the variety of experiences they reflect.(Cover story)
June 1, 2007... In a season rife with related events, the Brooklyn Museum's "Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art" is an eagerly anticipated component of a nationwide reevaluation of feminist art. It takes its place alongside the presentation...

A painter's progress: a large Hogarth exhibition reveals an artist who often relied on the pictorial strategies of contemporary theater and who was more at ease in engraving than in painting.(William Hogarth)
June 1, 2007... As you whiz, or crawl, from Central London to Heathrow airport you pass (on a perilous roundabout that dares you to make a diversion) a sign pointing to "Hogarth's House." There in once sleepy, pastoral and affluent Twickenham, a small but...

Strangers no more: Rosalyn Drexler has had a varied career as a playwright, novelist and artist. Her paintings from the '60s, the focus of a recent exhibition, reveal an issue-oriented Pop artist who made prescient use of images appropriated from the mass media.
June 1, 2007... For many, the exhibition "Rosalyn Drexler: I am the Beautiful Stranger--Paintings of the '60s," recently presented at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea, was a revelation. Drexler was a Pop artist with a difference. She shared with her better-known...

Noits and Skoobs: a recent New York exhibition presented the work of pioneering British artist John Latham, whose Conceptual projects made an indelible mark on postwar art.(Brief biography)
June 1, 2007... John Latham (1921-2006) died on New Year's Day last year, several months into a survey of his work at Tate Britain. As befits his contentious career, the Tate refused to include his 1991 God Is Great (#2) in the show. The sculpture consists of...

Let us now praise famous men: at once stubbornly physical and highly conceptual, Rachel Harrison's sculptures evoke ancient hero memorials and today's celebrity culture.("If I Did It" at Greene Naftali Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Ferrying me downstairs from Greene Naftali Gallery recently, the elevator man asked whether I liked the Rachel Harrison show there, telling me he just didn't get it. He wasn't alone. I hated to confess a similar feeling of bewilderment--one...

Dan Christensen: fluid line funky beat: an overview of the abstract painter's 40-year career samples his restless exploration of widely varying methods, tools and pictorial possibilities.
June 1, 2007... A useful cliche, "painters' painter" connotes not only excellence and dedication but also mastery at a level that can be best appreciated by fellow initiates. That the term can be applied with perfect accuracy to Dan Christensen was made clear...

Toon noir: in black-and-white paintings and drawings, Joyce Pensato portrays a cast of cartoon characters rendered with ferocious energy and a peculiar empathy.
June 1, 2007... Though Joyce Pensato's palette is primarily black and white, she explores emotional and psychological gray areas in her turbulent recasting of big, bouncy cartoon characters and stuffed animals as randy rogues of dubious intent. By turns...

Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater.(Fatty's; art restaurants)
June 1, 2007... Monet had Giverny; Kim Dingle has Fatty's. Having made a name for herself in the 1990s as a "bad-girl" artist messily showing the dark side of little girls, Dingle took a break from exhibiting to start and run Fatty's, a vegetarian restaurant...

Carrie Moyer at Canada.(painter)
June 1, 2007... A feminist revival currently permeating the U.S. art world was well served by the 10 paintings on view (all 2006) in Carrie Moyer's recent show. Populated by fertility-goddess-type figures and forms resembling anthropomorphic pottery with...

Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer.
June 1, 2007... Dana Schutz cut blob-shaped holes into two of the 14 paintings in her new exhibition, "Stand By Earth Man." The variously sized holes, a handful in each canvas, are dispersed across the nude figures of Male Model and Female Model (all works...

Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham.
June 1, 2007... While several of Joan Snyder's recent paintings feature an almost wall-like grid of colors, the majority draw the eye to cores glistening with floral effects set in fields emphatically marked with paint and speckled with other materials. In a...

Valie Export at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert.
June 1, 2007... Austrian artist Valie Export, a feminist "bad girl" since the 1960s when she cut the crotch out of her jeans and paraded through a pornographic movie theater, has lost none of her punch. This exhibition, only her second solo gallery show in New...

Rebecca Smith at Jeannie Freilich.
June 1, 2007... Rebecca Smith's eight new works, "The Glaciers" (2006), are part of a group of 12, which in turn is part of her "Blue Cage Sculpture" series, begun in 2002. "The Glaciers" is arguably her most satisfying project to date. Although the gallery...

Luisa Rabbia at Massimo Audiello.
June 1, 2007... Drawing is both a means and an end in Luisa Rabbia's quietly powerful multi-medium works. It is clearly a transformative practice through which she records in real time the sometimes unconscious journey from an idea or observation to its...

Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow.
June 1, 2007... Amy Cutler's gouache drawings of women are richly detailed and eerily elegant. Stoic figures carry out repetitive tasks or collapse in states of exhaustion. Combining art-historical references with a contemporary state of disenchantment, Cutler...

"What F Word?" at Cynthia Broan.(Feminism)
June 1, 2007... According to the press release for this lively group exhibition, the F word of the title might refer to any number of currently contentious topics, including Fascism, Flag and Faith. However, it was clear from the work on view that the primary...

"The Feminist Figure" at Forum.
June 1, 2007... "The Feminist Figure" brought together works by 22 contemporary women artists in an exhibition organized to coincide with the Feminist Art Project, a nationwide endeavor to promote the inclusion of women in culture. The show comprised...

Sylvia Sleigh at 1-20.
June 1, 2007... Sylvia Sleigh's sly subversions of old masters have secured her a place in textbooks of feminist art as well as in the current traveling show "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution." Sleigh's paintings from the 1970s-group portraits of female...

Claudette Schreuders at Jack Shainman.
June 1, 2007... Greeting visitors to "The Fall," a recent show of polychrome wood sculptures and color lithographs by South African artist Claudette Schreuders, was a female figure that set the serene, symbolically resonant tone of the exhibition. Typically...

Victor Grippo at Alexander & Bonin.
June 1, 2007... It is incredible that before this relatively small but densely packed exhibition, the work of Victor Grippo (1936-2002) had scarcely ever been shown in the U.S. Grippo, who spent most of his working life in Buenos Aires, was among a handful of...

Portia Munson at P.P.O.W.(Pilkington, Penny and Olsoff, Wendy)
June 1, 2007... Portia Munson made a name for herself in 1994 with her Pink Project, an astounding display of 2,000 pink things that included hairbrushes, curlers, dolls and every imaginable fluffy feminine tchotchke. Part of the "Bad Girls" exhibition at the...

Andrew Sendor at Caren Golden.
June 1, 2007... A heavy curtain blocking the gallery's front door and smoky gray walls set a somber tone for the oil-on-Plexiglas paintings in "Is There More to Life Than Bread, Blood and Bicycles?," New York-based Andrew Sendor's second solo show at Caren...

Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein at Marianne Boesky.(Clara Park, Positions of Contemporary Painting from Leipzig)
June 1, 2007... Graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and former students of Neo Rauch and Arno Rink, Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein first showed in New York at Boesky's 2004 group exhibition called "Clara Park, Positions of Contemporary...

Mitch Epstein at Sikkema Jenkins.(American Power)
June 1, 2007... Mitch Epstein's new series of photographs, "American Power," focuses on the physical evidence of America's relationship with the fuel of modern life. Engaging in what he calls "energy tourism," Epstein seeks out small towns where there are...

Lynn Davis at the Rubin Museum of Art.(Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis)
June 1, 2007... This unusual and evocative exhibition, "Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis," on view through July 17, combines eight major works of Buddhist sculpture of the 8th through the 17th centuries, from the museum's extensive holdings of Himalayan...

Vera Lutter at Gagosian.(Gagosian Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Vera Lutter's large, stately images are produced through the venerable device of the camera obscura, using a found or constructed room as the camera's box. In several of the works in this show, Venice's seasonal tidal flood appears to spread...

William Kentridge at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.(Theater review)
June 1, 2007... The Magic Flute, Mozart's last opera (1791), has frequently attracted visual artists. Kokoschka, Chagall, Hockney and Maurice Sendak designed stage versions, and Ingmar Bergman turned a performance of it at Stockholm's 18th-century...

Naomie Kremer at Hosfelt.
June 1, 2007... When looking at certain kinds of abstract art, you are often tempted to find something figurative for your eyes to latch on to. Naomie Kremer's frenetic, tactile paintings indulge that urge without crossing the line into overt figuration....

Fiona Rae at PaceWildenstein.
June 1, 2007... Fiona Rae's first one-person New York show in nine years, and her first at PaceWildenstein, dazzled gallerygoers with its visual opulence and its eloquent dialogue between figuration and abstraction. A surprising degree of cohesiveness...

Uwe Kowski at Mary Boone.(Mary Boone Gallery )
June 1, 2007... The Leipzig-based artist Uwe Kowski makes large vigorous paintings that combine a variety of styles while maintaining a singular visceral energy. The six oil paintings that were on view are bracingly full of information: fragments of text,...

Paulina Olowska at Metro Pictures.(Nowa Scena)
June 1, 2007... In her first New York solo show--"Nowa Scena" (new scene)--Warsaw-based artist Paulina Olowska presented billboard-scale collages steeped in nostalgia but crackling with energy in the here and now. Photographic enlargements and texts (some...

Nicola Verlato at Stux.(Stux Gallery)
June 1, 2007... The Italian figurative painter Nicola Verlato is a virtuoso who does not shy away from displaying his skill at drawing and painting. The problem with virtuosi is that they pull it all off with such facility that their work can seem vacuous; we...

Lloyd Martin at Stephen Haller.(Stephen Haller Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Lloyd Martin's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery continued on the theme of building. Martin constructs his paintings in layers: stains, drips, bands, bars and perfectly level lines. There is much to see within these carefully composed...

Bill Jensen at Cheim & Read.
June 1, 2007... Four blackish paintings of recent vintage headlined this show of work by veteran New York painter Bill Jensen, occupying the space opposite the gallery's entrance. Like the other 21 paintings shown, they are oil on linen, vertical and...

Junko Yoda at Zabriskie.(Zabriskie Gallery)
June 1, 2007... The view out of an airplane window while flying high over New York State's Finger Lakes some years ago inspired veteran Japanese-born New York painter Junko Yoda to initiate a series of lush and sinuous abstractions that she continues to refine...

Laurina Paperina Freight + Volume.
June 1, 2007... The initial surprise of Laurina Paperina's show was its funky, knocked-off look. Three 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood leaned casually side by side against one wall, loosely painted in lurid pink. On the left a homespun Mickey Mouse rolled...

Marta Chilindron and Karin Waisman at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY.(Sculptures in Four Dimensions)
June 1, 2007... The exhibition "Sculptures in Four Dimensions" contained recent work, much of it inviting viewer participation, by two sculptors born in Argentina but now resident in New York. Marta Chilindron's Blue Cube 48 is made of ultramarine ribbed...

Celeste Roberge at Aucocisco.(Aucocisco Gellery)
June 1, 2007... A graduate of the Portland (now Maine) School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a former fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Celeste Roberge made her first major statements in sculpture in the late 1980s....

Andrew Junge at Greene Contemporary Warehouse.
June 1, 2007... Styrofoam Hummer (American Detritus), the ghostly white work of art parked in this warehouse exhibition space, is an obsessively detailed, full-scale replica of the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV, developed in the 1980s by...

Robert Livingston at Perimeter.(Perimeter Gallery)
June 1, 2007... During 40-plus years as an artist, Robert Livingston has made theater set designs, furniture, abstract sculpture and more. He recently exhibited 11 works in pastel and paint on formed wood panels that employ an economical, deceptively simple...

Andre Ruesch at Phil Space.(A Murder of Crows in Phil Space Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Andre Ruesch is a Swiss-born, Santa Fe-based photographer who has been teaching and exhibiting his work in the Southwest for over 15 years. This show juxtaposed recent works from two seemingly unrelated bodies of his digital photos--a series of...

"The Performing Archive" at the 18th Street Art Center.
June 1, 2007... Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, vital members of the West Coast feminist performance art movement of the late 1960s-'70s, assembled a small but evocative exhibition of materials archiving their projects and those of their peers. Archives, by...

Dave Muller at Blum & Poe.
June 1, 2007... Both art and rock 'n' roll have tangled lineages and armies of aficionados arguing about what begat what. Combining the two, Dave Muller is an artist and a DJ in possession of some 3,500 vinyl albums, who also plays bass and trumpet in the...

Lauren Davies at Ampersand.(Dominion in Ampersand Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Lauren Davies's recent exhibition, titled "Dominion," consisted of eight three-dimensional works and a pair of large, unframed digital prints on canvas replicating antique French maps of Africa. Petting Zoo/Pongo (2005) and Ivory Products...

Kate Bright at Emily Tsingou.(Emily Tsingou Gallery)
June 1, 2007... Kate Bright's land- and seascapes are to nature what My Little Ponies are to ponies, and suggest the fanciful awe a city-bred girl might feel when first encountering nature's majesty. Bright addresses nature at its most emotional essence, yet...

Peter Zimmermann at Emmanuel Perrotin.("Reliance")
June 1, 2007... In his solo exhibition "Reliance," Peter Zimmermann tackled the tradition of "pure" abstraction. Adopting techniques dear to action and Color Field painters, the German artist bastardized both with astonishing acumen. His lollipop-colored...

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at MACBA.(The Killing Machine at the Museum of Contemporary Art)
June 1, 2007... Gone are the whispery, seductive voices we've come to expect from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Also missing are the poetic, as if overheard, fragments of personal history. Instead, the soundtrack for the artists' new installation The...

Natalie Czech at Jette Rudolph.("Daily Mirror" Galerie Jette Rudolph)
June 1, 2007... As war and atrocity become commonplaces of our cultural landscape, their documentary images lose impact. Instead of evoking our empathy as evidence of humanity's vulnerability, they rather become a blur, more likely to reinforce Brecht's...

Leonard Bullock at Kjubh.
June 1, 2007... Leonard Bullock, originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. A sense of artistic breakthrough pervades Na the paintings and monoprints in his...

Exhibition debut for three Monets.(ART WORLD)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Among the 62 major works on view in the Claude Monet survey currently appearing at New York's Wildenstein & Company [through June 15] are three canvases that have never before been publicly displayed. The largest and most striking of the trio...

Contemporary Arts Center.(People)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Dan Cameron is the new director of visual arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. He was senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York from 1995 to 2005, and curator of the 2006 Taipei Biennial and the 2003...

Raphaela Platow, chief curator and acting director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has been appointed director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati.(People)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Raphaela Platow, chief curator and acting director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has been appointed director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. She replaces Linda Shearer, who resigned in September 2006.

New York's Japan Society Gallery.(People)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Joe Earle has been named vice president and director of New York's Japan Society Gallery, effective Sept. 4. He has been chair of the Asia, Oceania and Africa department at the Boston MFA for three and a half years.

Obituaries.(ART WORLD)(Obituary)
June 1, 2007... Salvatore Scarpitta, 88, artist, died Apr. 10 at his home in New York from complications of diabetes. Known for his work in a number of innovative modes, Scarpitta, who was American born, began his career in Rome in the 1950s. Following art...

Nelson-Atkins expansion opens.(ART WORLD)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Running 840 feet along the eastern end of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art campus in Kansas City, the Bloch Building, a sprawling addition designed by architect Steven Holl, opens on June 9. Contrasting dramatically with the adjacent original...

Pinault defeats Gugg in Venice.(ART WORLD)(Francois Pinault)(Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Following protracted negotiations, French billionaire Francois Pinault has officially triumphed over the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in a bid to convert a disused 15th-century customs house on the Punta della Dogana into a new museum of...

Dia's Manhattan comeback.(ART WORLD)(Din Art Foundation)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Since closing its Chelsea facility in 2004, the Din Art Foundation has not had a substantial presence in Manhattan, aside from a handful of permanent installations by Beuys, De Maria and Max Neuhaus. While it continues to search for a new home,...

Philip Johnson's home goes public.(ART WORLD)(Glass House)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Not long after it was built in 1949, Philip Johnson's private residence in New Canaan, Conn., known as the Glass House, came to be regarded as a key example of American modernist architecture. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House...

Toronto Gets a Libeskind.(ART WORLD)(Daniel Libeskind)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... For one week this summer, architecture aficionados will be able to check out Daniel Libeskind's newest building, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, without "distractions." On June 2, the natural...

Armory Show sold.(ART WORLD)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... As this issue goes to press in early May, New York's Armory Show art fair has announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with the Chicago-based Merchandise Mart Properties, the property management company that also produces 300...

Denver museum update.(ART WORLD)(Denver Art Museum)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Seven months after opening its much celebrated Daniel Libeskind-designed building, at a cost of $110 million [see A.i.A., Feb. '07], the Denver Art Museum announced in April that it had laid off 38 employees--or 14 percent of its staff--though...