Art in America articles from June 2008

Art in America archives from June 2008

Mindful artists.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... To the Editors: Thanks to Nancy Princenthal for her brilliant and thoroughly researched article on art and the mind [A.i.A., Apr. '08]. In early 2007, Art Institute of Boston co-curator Ellen Schon and I surveyed the Boston area for...

Counting the Fallen.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... To the Editors: I am most appreciative of the article about my installation Fallen in your April 2008 issue. However, I wish to make one correction. The article states that the "official count" of the American war dead "includes only...

Rating Ramirez.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... To the Editors: Richard Kalina's article on Martin Ramirez's artwork [A.i.A., Oct. '07] is an inspired treatise on Ramirez's art and his deserving place "within" the mainstream of modernism. I agree that this artist's passion and...

Timing Cleveland's expansion.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... To the Editors: I was glad to see the Cleveland Museum of Art's expansion and renovation referenced in Ruth Meyer's report from Detroit, "A Citizens' Museum" [A.i.A., May '08]. However, I would like to offer a correction and to clarify the...

Boris Lurie remembered.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2008... To the Editors: Here are some clarifications for the Boris Lurie obituary [A.i.A., Apr. '08]. He did not like or respect the museums and refused to show at the Whitney unless they let him choose the work. We started the NO! movement in...

Candidates on the arts.(FRONT PAGE)(presidential candidate's art policy)
June 1, 2008... With an unpopular war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global oil, food and economic crises looming, national arts policy isn't exactly the hot political topic it was during the culture wars of the 1990s. But for the record, here's...

Art: the other game in Beijing.(FRONT PAGE)
June 1, 2008... The Beijing Summer Olympics are scheduled for Aug. 8-24, and theoretically the city's art world is preparing to take advantage of the upcoming concentration of global attention, in practice, however, most spaces are playing it safe, given the...

Art in Denver: no contest.(FRONT PAGE)(Denver Office of Cultural Affairs has organized a series of artists' projects)
June 1, 2008... To coincide with the Democratic National Convention this August, the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs has organized a series of artists' projects. An official program of the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee, "Dialog:City" (Aug. 21-29)...

Louise Bourgeois on the big screen.(FRONT PAGE)(Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine)
June 1, 2008... Coinciding with Louise Bourgeois's touring retrospective opening at New York's Guggenheim Museum on June 27, several recent documentary films about the life and work of the French-born New York artist are screening in U.S. theaters. One of the...

Oppenheim "Church" uprooted again.(FRONT PAGE)(Dennis Oppenheim's exhibition)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Since its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1997, Dennis Oppenheim's monumental outdoor sculpture, Device to Root Out Evil, has drawn plenty of controversy and recently caused an upset in Canada. The 22-foot-tall work, in steel, glass and...

Provocation art: where to draw the line?(FRONT PAGE)(art exhibition posponed because of animal rights protest)
June 1, 2008... A number of artists' projects have recently stirred up controversy, variously raising the ire of animal-rights activists, abortion opponents, pro-choice advocates, fertility-challenged women, and more. On Mar. 26, Adel Abdessemed's show at...

Whitney's plans for downtown.(FRONT PAGE)(Whitney Museum of American Art expansion plan)
June 1, 2008... On May 1, the Whitney Museum of American Art released the latest plan in its on-again-off-again attempts to expand, this time to an offsite location. In late 2006, the Whitney, battling community opposition to its recent expansion scheme,...

Future home for still museum.(FRONT PAGE)(Clyfford Still Museum )(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... The Clyfford Still Museum has released the plans for its future home in Denver, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Groundbreaking is scheduled for early 2009 with an opening projected for 2010. The 31,500-square-foot,...

Summer preview.(SANTA FE)(Calendar)
June 1, 2008... Neither a downturn in the economy nor high gas prices seem to have deterred the tourist and cultural industries in the Santa Fe region, which continue to thrive. In addition to the proliferation of casinos with adjacent golf courses, convention...

Pen & ink.(Cartoon)
June 1, 2008... Dan Perjovschi on the state of the world I reach God I reach CNN [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] HURRAH HURRAH! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I AM OPPRESSED! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MY DICTATOR WAS WORST THAN YOURS ...

Artists, guns and money.(Art Power)(Guernica and Total War)(Book review)
June 1, 2008... Art Power, by Boris Groys, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2008; 185 pages, $22.95 hardcover. Guernica and Total War, by Ian Patterson, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007; 199 pages, $22.95 hardcover. In spite of the war in...

The art of suffering.(The Abu Ghraib Effect)(Book review)
June 1, 2008... The Abu Ghraib Effect, by Stephen F. Eisenman, London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2007; 144 pages, $19.95 paper. Among the most indelible and disturbing images from the Iraq War are the photographs...

Activist esthetics.(Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall)(Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century)(Book review)
June 1, 2008... Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Allan Antliff, Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007; 224 pages, $23.95 paper. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, by Gerald...

Abstract expressionism and the Cold War: did New York really steal the idea of modern art? Were the artists tools of U.S. policy? 25 years on, Serge Guilbaut's j'accuse can still prompt a fiery response.(ISSUES & COMMENTARY)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A major thesis of Serge Guilbaut's How New York le the Idea of Modern Art is that the Abstract Expressionists were Cold Warriors. Soon after his book was published in 1983, Guilbant and I debated this claim at the...

Cold war and hot art: a wide-ranging and politically alert exhibition revealed new aspects of that durable topic of 20th-century art history: the postwar cultural rivalry between France and the U.S.(REPORT FROM BARCELONA)
June 1, 2008... Now at the beginning of an age of demented mechanic, all plastic art is created under the threat of material destruction, for even at the base of the pigment are the explosive elements of the atom. --Tennessee Williams, "Hans Hofmann, An...

Making it real: the amateur photography of war brings new content and esthetics to documentary and fictional filmmaking.(WAR MOVIES)
June 1, 2008... We can imagine, in the privacy of our thoughts, that war is heroic and honorable--even noble. Photography can make it difficult for us to maintain these illusions. --Errol Morris, New York Times, Nov. 20, 2004 The recent conflicts in...

The way we were, the way we are: China's most outspoken artist reflects on the ongoing struggle for expressive freedom in the People's Republic.(CHINA WATCH)(Ai Weiwei)(Interview)
June 1, 2008... AN INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI Art in America: Your acquaintance with art and politics in China clearly began with your father, the famous modernist poet Ai Qing. In 1935, long before you were born, he was imprisoned by Nationalist forces for...

The revolution will be visualized: the compelling graphic designs of Emory Douglas, "Revolutionary Artist" of the Black Panther Party, helped shape the group's public image and reflected its evolution from politically militant to socially mitigating.(POLITICAL GRAPHICS)
June 1, 2008... Looking beyond the gallery scene, deeply rooted in his conviction that all art is political, and valuing real-life action and change above all else, Emory Douglas used his prodigious graphic skills as Minister of Culture and Revolutionary...

NY galleries.(Calendar)
June 1, 2008... 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 Website: www.aperture.org Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 May 22-July 31:...

Bearing witness: a recent show at El Museo del Barrio explored four decades of performance art in the Americas.(ACTIONS)
June 1, 2008... A video of Papo Colo's Superman 51 (1977) was installed above the entrance to "Arte [not equal to] Vida: Actions by Artists from the Americas, 1960-2000," a survey of Latin American action- and performance-based art curated by Deborah Cullen...

Argentina provokes: a recent exhibition linked contemporary Argentine art to that of the generation preceding the 1976 coup and ensuing "dirty war.".(IMPORT/EXPORT)(Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960-2007)
June 1, 2008... Argentine culture has a sort of amnesia when it comes to its own art. This lacuna has developed both as a psychic mechanism for moving forward despite all the crises that have befallen the country, and because of a tendency of artists to find...

Destroy, they said: in what was billed as an attempt to "de-Hellenize" contemporary Greek culture and relieve it of its classical past, the 1st Athens Biennial sprang into being.(REPORT FROM ATHENS)(the first Athens Biennial titled Destroy Athens)
June 1, 2008... This past fall, Athens succumbed to the pandemic of biennial fever and mounted the 1st Athens Biennial, provocatively titled "Destroy Athens." The joint inspiration of curator Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (who is also the director of the Deste...

Primary colors: an artist takes aim at the never ending presidential campaign.(ELECTIONS)(Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's Residential Erection)
June 1, 2008... Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's first New York solo show, "Residential Erection," was the perfect antidote to the nonstop media drama surrounding the run-up to the presidential election. Born in 1976, Hung came to the U.S. from Hong Kong with his family...

In times of trouble: several recent videos and films reflect the growing cultural response, often indirect but nonetheless penetrating, to the political conditions of our day.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the fifth year of the U.S. war in Iraq and the final year of the Bush presidency, the 20th century looks like a very distant place, and a cultural response has slowly built to the ravaged political landscape...

Collateral damage: Siah Armajani's Fallujah employs some of his signature architectural vocabulary in a new, darkly pessimistic tone.
June 1, 2008... Siah Armajani, the Iranian-American artist well known for his public-art projects and sculptures of sociopolitical import, moved to the U.S. in 1960, at the age of 21. Since that time, the central recurring message and intended social function...

Global warnings.(Melting Ice /A Hot Topic: Envisioning Change)(Calendar)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Melting Ice /A Hot Topic" proclaims the name of the exhibition subtitled "Envisioning Change," which opened in Oslo last June, traveled to Brussels and Monaco, and opened recently at Chicago's Field Museum. Indeed,...

Talking politics 2008: six artists who have taken on controversial public issues in their work assess the current status of political art.(Discussion)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the midst of a particularly bruising political year, and as the ever more unpopular Iraq war competes for public attention with signs of impending economic disaster at home, it seems an appropriate moment to...

Rules of Engagement: with photographic truthfulness no longer taken on faith, some photographers are working out a new set of protocols for making pictures that are seriously real.
June 1, 2008... Shortly before the conclusion of Shattered Glass, the 2003 film that recounts the downfall of a hot young journalist at the New Republic who was found to have fabricated the better part of his reputation-building features, the magazine's...

Written in Stone: built of blocks from Israel and Palestine and assembled by masons from throughout the region, Michal Rovner's massive stone structures rely on delicate networks of understanding.
June 1, 2008... Though she set out to be a dancer, Michal Rovner has instead pursued photography and video, with a gradual switch in emphasis from still to moving images. Over the past 15 years, her video projects have grown both more abstract and, especially...

Handforth's fallen angels: Mark Handforth's heterogeneous sculpture coalesced in an installation with thematic intimations of lost paradise.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mark Handforth's recent exhibition at Gavin Brown in New York, the artist's first since 2005, was no less than thrilling. Proving again that he is capable of working in a variety of styles and mediums, he is...

Sticking it: beginning with the controversial "Supercock" drawings she did at Yale during the Vietnam War, Judith Bernstein has sustained a bold feminist critique of masculinity fetishized into militarism.(Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Judith Bernstein's recent show at Mitchell Algus Gallery, a kind of mini-retrospective titled "Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008," leaves us impatient for a fuller treatment of her career, as well as a robust...

Piotr Uklanski at Gagosian.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... In a flamboyant introduction to the cultural and military history of his native Poland, Piotr Uklanski, who lives in New York and Warsaw, dressed the far wall of an imposing and very long foyer with the flat-pleated drapes ordinarily used to...

Subodh Gupta at Jack Shainman.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... An elaborate installation of towers of highly polished metal food vessels stacked on a long moving platform stood at the entrance to Subodh Gupta's second exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery. At once coolly mechanical and seductive, this...

Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone.(NEW YORK)(Illumination)
June 1, 2008... "Illumination," only the second New York solo for Ai Weiwei, was a literally sparkling demonstration of the Chinese artist's gifts for formal seduction and pointed commentary, Ai commanded the gallery's grand space with three works (all 2007),...

Coco Fusco at The Project.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... For an exhibition called "Buried Pig with Moros," Coco Fusco assembled various documents and artifacts pertaining to the treatment of Islamic insurgents, known as Moros and also as juramentados, who resisted the U.S. occupation of the...

Tseng Kwong Chi at Paul Kasmin.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... In 1978, the artist Joseph Tseng, not yet 30, changed his name to Tseng Kwong Chi and moved to New York. Born and educated in Hong Kong, he had studied in Vancouver, Montreal and Paris. In New York he established himself as a photographer and...

Los Carpinteros at Sean Kelly.(NEW YORK)(Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "A household item shows who you are," Marco Castillo, of the duo Los Carpinteros, told a Cincinnati reporter on the occasion of a 2006 exhibition there. If so, many sculptures by this Havana-based pair (Castillo and...

Yinka Shonibare at James Cohan.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... According to Yinka Shonibare MBE (who always uses his honorific, relishing the irony of its placement after his patently un-English name), "Prospero's Monsters," the title of his recent exhibition, refers to the colonialist implications of the...

Luis Camnitzer at Alexander Gray.(NEW YORK)(Last Words )
June 1, 2008... This succinct, text-driven and quietly powerful exhibition included just two works, one old and one new, evidencing disparate but not dueling aspects of a pioneering Conceptualist's practice. Since the late 1960s, Luis Camnitzer's work has been...

Meg Webster at Paula Cooper.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... Among four newly minted containers in Meg Webster's first solo exhibition in New York since 2000 is Melted Weapon Box (2008). It consists of two nested cubes, one of steel and the other aluminum, 4 3/4 inches in outside measure, displayed next...

Suzanne Treister and Kim Rugg at P.P.O.W.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... The print media may be dying, but Suzanne Treister and Kim Rugg, artists based in the UK who show mainly in Europe, have each found ways to keep them alive--at least for the time being. Treister is best known for her ongoing project HEXEN 2039,...

Muntadas at Kent.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... A telling marker of the distance we have traveled in the last 20 years is the contrast between Muntadas's 1985 Selling the Future, installed in a back room at Kent during his latest exhibition, and his new work on view in the main spaces. The...

Robin Lowe at Lennon, Weinberg.(NEW YORK)(On the Beach)
June 1, 2008... A New York-based painter given to narrative cycles, Robin Lowe found his source for this exhibition of stylized marine paintings in Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach (1957). A product of the Cold War, it supposed the consequences of global...

Robert Rauschenberg at PaceWildenstein and Jacobson Howard.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Robert Rauschenberg's show of recent photo-transfer pieces, "Runts," at PaceWildenstein, was full of vitality. Each of these 16 montages feature crisp blowups selected from the artist's extensive archive of photos...

Dennis Rudolph at Perry Rubenstein.(NEW YORK)(The Holy War, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth)
June 1, 2008... The melodramatic title of Berliner Dennis Rudolph's first New York solo show, 'THE HOLY WAR, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth," belied the reserved execution of its main feature--a group of eight identically sized paintings sourced from...

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... The dreamy ambiguity of Luc Tuymans's recent paintings makes it hard to locate an exact source of foreboding--but beneath the hushed atmospherics, it's there. His work emanates a cold light, the canvases' surfaces faintly visible beneath pale...

Subhankar Banerjee at Sundaram Tagore.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... Subhankar Banerjee's exhibition of large-scale color photographs documents the Alaskan Arctic as it has never been seen or imagined before. As the first photographer to shoot a complete record of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in all...

Adrian Piper at Elizabeth Dee.
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Throughout her career, Adrian Piper has engaged the uneasy issue of race in post-Civil Rights era America, a time when racial tension has not often been at the political forefront but has still simmered and...

Adel Abdessemed at P.S.1.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... In his contribution to last summer's Venice Biennale, Adel Abdessemed had 11 neon signs with the word "Exil" written on them installed at some of the Biennale's exits. Exil, in French, means "exile," but to the Anglophone, it appears to be a...

Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With monumental tableaux of strangely ordinary worlds, Jeff Wall continues to chart the terrain of contemporary photographic realism. His recent show included six mural-size, black-and-white prints and two equally...

Lori Grinker at Nailya Alexander.(NEW YORK)(Iraq: Scars and Exiles)
June 1, 2008... "At least in Iraq you die only once," an Iraqi refugee, "Zahar," one of the subjects of photographer Lori Grinker's recent exhibition "Iraq: Scars and Exiles," said about seeking refuge in Amman, Jordan, after the U.S.'s "freedom" mission....

Sigalit Landau at the Museum of Modern Art.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sigalit Landau has incorporated rotting fruit, storms of cotton candy and moldy mouse pads in her installations; fashioned lifesize ecorche figures that are persuasively surfaced with papier-mache sinew and gore; and...

Andre Butzer at Metro Pictures.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Visitors to Andre Butzer's recent show at Metro Pictures found themselves, in the opening gallery, stared down by four giant, cartoonlike figures from 10-by-7-foot paintings barely big enough to hold them. All four...

Hans van Meeuwen at Cristinerose.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Hans van Meeuwen's A Man's Height (2007) was carefully positioned so that viewers immediately saw it through a succession of doorways when stepping off the elevator to enter Cristinerose's new space on 26th Street....

David Maeh at Forum.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] David Mach's large-scale collages (all 2007) are composed of thousands of postcards, placed upon each other so that only a fraction of the image is visible. Shards of postcard images ranging from Marilyn Monroe to a...

John Baldessari and Alejandro Cesarco at Murray Guy.(NEW YORK)(Retrospective)
June 1, 2008... "Retrospective," a collaboration between John Baldessari and the promising young Uruguayan artist Alejandro Cesarco, combines simple graphics with sly literary exchanges. The project, part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, is a...

Stephen Dean at Sara Meltzer.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... An exploration of color is central to Stephen Dean's work. In previous exhibitions, the French-born New York artist examined its sociopolitical implications in lush videos such as Pulse (2001), shot at a Hindu festival in north India in which...

Heather Cox at Knoedler.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Responding to the natural phenomena of gatherings and movements of creatures of a kind, Heather Cox designed the kinetic, penetrable installation Migration (2006), inaugurating the new Knoedler project space on the...

George Condo at Luhring Augustine.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] This may be George Condo's most effective exhibition to date. Close on the heels of his sensation-causing show in London--with its distorted portrait of Queen Elizabeth, dubbed by the artist the "cabbage patch...

George Condo at Nicholas Robinson.(NEW YORK)
June 1, 2008... Scion of the court of Velazquez by way of Disneyland, George Condo established himself as the grand mannerist of contemporary Pop painting in the vibrant East Village scene of the early 1980s. At no loss for amusement in his own mastery of the...

Jane Irish at Locks.(PHILADELPHIA)(Paintings for Winning Hearts and Minds)
June 1, 2008... "Paintings for Winning Hearts and Minds," an exhibition of new work by Jane Irish at Locks Gallery, was aptly titled. A seasoned and energetic antiwar activist, Irish surmounts the limitations of much political art, which too often allows the...

"Claiming Space" at the Katzen Center, American University.(WASHINGTON, D.C.)
June 1, 2008... In sensitive political times, especially in a city as political as Washington, it is not surprising that two major exhibitions on the history of feminist art would offer two contrasting visions of what, exactly, is understood by the term...

Otabenga Jones and Associates at the Menil Collection.(HOUSTON)(Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya F. Evans and Robert A. Pruitt)
June 1, 2008... For this exhibition, the Houston collective Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJ&A) converted one of the smaller galleries at the Menil Collection into a classroom, complete with blackboards, students' desks, cabinets, posters and vitrines. OJ&A is...

Wesley Harvey at WaterSpace South.(SLATON, TEX.)
June 1, 2008... In his second solo gallery show since obtaining his MFA last year from Texas Tech University, Wesley Harvey expanded his exploration of kitsch and subtle gay themes in a series of six porcelain-and-mixed-medium sculptures. They were exhibited...

Matthew Moore at Lisa Sette.(SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.)(Cultivating the Oasis)
June 1, 2008... Forgive the gallery-goers--and there were many--who assumed photo trickery in the 12 medium-and large-scale digital photographs comprising Matthew Moore's show "Cultivating the Oasis." An aerial view of a lone field, for example, is incised...

Danica Phelps at Sister.(LOS ANGELES)(The Brown Stripe Factory)
June 1, 2008... Danica Phelps made art to order for this quiet but provocative show, "The Brown Stripe Factory." She devised a transparent system of commercial exchange that was nevertheless dense with personal and social implication. Patrons could commission...

Eric Beltz at Acuna-Hansen.(LOS ANGELES)
June 1, 2008... In his audacious gallery debut, Santa Barbara artist Edc Beltz puts America's founding fathers through a kind of psychological wringer. His tightly knit series of exquisitely rendered pencil drawings on paper, collectively titled "HISTROY!,"...

Patrick Heron at Hackett-Freedman.(SAN FRANCISCO)
June 1, 2008... If you think of Patrick Heron (1920-1999) as an old guard modernist, think again. Or go look at his late gouaches, the revelation of this 17-piece exhibition spanning four decades of the British painter's career. They presage work by the likes...

Hung Liu at Rena Bransten.(SAN FRANCISCO)(Daughters of the Revolution)
June 1, 2008... Art with political content has, arguably, more currency in this decade than it has at any time since the '60s. However, politics has always been the theme of Hung Liu's art, because it is central to the history of her life. She was born in 1948...

Rachel Howard at Haunch of Venison.(LONDON)
June 1, 2008... Debilitating depression, the subject of many of Rachel Howard's recent paintings, casts the sufferer into a world that can seem drained of color, hopelessly confusing and weighed down with sadness. Howard turned to the subject after the suicide...

Deborah Ligorio at Francesca Minini.(MILAN)
June 1, 2008... Baroque images of the historic eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, Italy's largest active volcanos, are a favorite element of upper-class Italian interiors, and many a modern Italian home is outfitted with engravings of lava, fire and mayhem. What,...

Dean Sameshima at Peres Projects.(BERLIN)(Numbers II--Ode to Johnny Rio)
June 1, 2008... As the name suggests, "Numbers II--Ode to Johnny Rio" is a sequel of sorts to Dean Sameshima's first solo show at the Berlin branch of Peres Projects. In that first "Numbers" show, the title referred to numerals printed next to colored dots on...

Cay Sophie Rabinowitz has resigned as artistic director of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach after four months in the post, citing personal reasons.(People)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Cay Sophie Rabinowitz has resigned as artistic director of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach after four months in the post, citing personal reasons. The fairs will now be headed by Marc Spiegler, former director of strategy and development,...

Omer Fast is the winner of the 2008 Bucksbaum Award, given to an artist in the Whitney Biennial.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Omer Fast is the winner of the 2008 Bucksbaum Award, given to an artist in the Whitney Biennial. Fast, who receives $100,000, won for his video installation The Casting (2007), which interweaves an American soldier's stories of his accidentally...

The New Museum and Altoids mint company recently presented the first Altoids Awards to Ei Arakawa, Michael Patterson-Carver, Lauren Kelley and Michael Stickrod.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... The New Museum and Altoids mint company recently presented the first Altoids Awards to Ei Arakawa, Michael Patterson-Carver, Lauren Kelley and Michael Stickrod. Winners of the biennial prize each receive $25,000 and a group exhibition organized...

Peter Doig recently won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, worth about $155,000, from the Society for Modern Art.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Peter Doig recently won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, worth about $155,000, from the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. --"Artworld" is compiled by Stephanie Cash and David Ebony

The Clark Art Institute has selected Peter Schjeldahl as the winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... The Clark Art Institute has selected Peter Schjeldahl as the winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. The $25,000 prize, funded by the Beinecke Family through the Prospect Hill Foundation, is given every two years for...

The National Arts Club recently honored Matthew Barney with its Medal of Honor.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... The National Arts Club recently honored Matthew Barney with its Medal of Honor for Lifetime Achievement in Art. --"Artworld" is compiled by Stephanie Cash and David Ebony

The Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, which pairs established figures with emerging artists in various fields, has announced the new round of participants in its biennial program.(Awards & Grants)(Masanori Handa)(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... The Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, which pairs established figures with emerging artists in various fields, has announced the new round of participants in its biennial program. Visual arts mentor Rebecca Horn has selected Japanese...