Art in America articles from March 2002

Art in America archives from March 2002

Bloomberg and NYC Arts: a balancing act. (Front Page).(Michael R. Bloomberg)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Following eight years of legal and philosophical battles with Rudy Giuliani, the New York art world may finally get a break with new mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum...

A blue border for Ground Zero. (Front Page).(Mary Miss' plan for monument at the World Trade Center site)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In the months since the World Trade Center was destroyed, many artists and architects have considered ways to revitalize Lower Manhattan and to help the city heal. Mary Miss, an artist known for her large-scale, quasi-architectural outdoor...

Asia Society spotlights contemporary commissions. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Asia Society's renovated and expanded headquarters in Manhattan, designed by architect Bartholomew Voorsanger, recently debuted to glowing reviews. One of the highlights of the $38-million project is the prominence of site-specific...

Parthenon marbles back in play. (Front Page).(controversial plan for Elgin marbles to be loaned to Greece for the Olympics)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Hoping to secure a long-term loan of the so-called Elgin marbles from the British Museum in time for the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, Greek officials have put aside their ownership claim, toned down their accusatory rhetoric and offered to...

Back to the Bosphorus: the 2001 Istanbul Biennial was titled "Egofugal," a term invented by the curator to suggest diffusion of the individual ego into broader systems and networks. (Report from Istanbul).
March 1, 2002... What is it, alas, about the Istanbul Biennial's timing? The previous edition occurred just a few weeks after the devastating Aug. 17, 1999, earthquake in northwest Turkey, which killed some 17,000 people and injured thousands more [see A.i.A.,...

A passage to China: not just a conduit for merchandise, the ancient Silk Road also brought new religions and foreign populations into China--as is reflected in the hybrid objects in a traveling Asia Society show. (Import/Export).
March 1, 2002... The inaugural exhibition for the Asia Society and Museum's newly renovated, intimate galleries opens up a vista of the Silk Road, that ancient route stretching from Byzantium on the Mediterranean coast to the Chinese capital, Changan (modern...

Tokyo togs: in a new book and a U.S. gallery exhibition, photographer Shoichi Aoki celebrates the wryly imaginative, cross-cultural streetwear of Japan's teenage fashion pranksters. (Photography).
March 1, 2002... Clothing, used as a form of personal expression, has a venerable history. Yet the choice of what to wear is always, of course, affected by community signals, which regulate styles of normal dress and sometimes prompt deviation from them. In the...

Studios in the sky: World Views, a residency program at the World Trade Center, provided artists with a unique creative environment and studios with amazing vistas. Works by the last group of artists were recently on display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo.
March 1, 2002... The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) was created in 1973, the year the World Trade Center was completed, to help develop the area's cultural life. Its activities have included organizing numerous performances and exhibitions, giving...

Arte Povera: the recount: with affinities to neo-Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Conceptualism, Post-Minimalism, Process art and performance, Italy's Arte Povera encompassed the most vital tendencies of the 1960s and early '70s. A major exhibition, now in midtour, documents the movement's breadth and energy.
March 1, 2002... Arte Povera may be the most talked-about neglected movement, the best-fed underdog, of recent all history. Beyond the borders of its native Italy, Arte Povera commands name recognition without commensurate critical esteem, and its apparent...

Our Miss Brooks: erotic and histrionic, the paintings of Romaine Brooks capture a cosmopolitan community of avant-gardists, expatriates and sensualists. Her coolly mannered early-20th-century portraits were the subject of an overdue retrospective.
March 1, 2002... For decades, the atmospheric, somber portraits by Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) were marginalized by art history, considered belated and melancholic reflections of rarefied, fin de siecle taste. The gender-bending figurative explorations of the...

Illuminations for a dark place: in the socially tumultuous period of the 1960s and '70s, a number of American artists began to experiment with projected imagery and video, seeking to free art from its traditional physical dimensions. A recent museum exhibition offered a look at this pioneering, often chilly work.
March 1, 2002... With tourists staying away from New York, it was quiet in the city's museums last fall. The relatively low attendance at the Whitney Museum during the run of "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977" seemed somehow apt, or...

Attack of the abstract.(Mod Lang at Feigen Contemporary)
March 1, 2002... During the past few years, Jeremy Blake has swiftly established himself as one of the preeminent digital artists around. Work by the 30-year-old Cal Arts graduate is held by several major international museums. He was in the last Whitney...

Looking good: the videos of Burt Barr: in a series of works created over a four-year period, New York artist Burt Barr explores the technical language of film, Hollywood cliches, the irresistible silliness of puns and the sheer beauty of the monochrome image.
March 1, 2002... If you have gotten out of the habit of black and white, go see veteran video artist Burt Barr's version of it for a refresher. His luminous tapes--spare, succinct (often no more than 15 minutes, sometimes less than 2), with and without...

Perfect uncertainty.(Robert Adams and the American West)
March 1, 2002... Robert Adams is preeminent among the many photographers who have concerned themselves with the urban development of the once-wild lands of the American West. He began to photograph on the Colorado high plains in 1965, and the subjects of his...

Seeing beneath the surface: Kathleen Gilje's re-creations of iconic paintings--flawlessly executed and slyly doctored--challenge the old boys' club of traditional art history. Fortified with dead-on parodies of academic discourse, her travesties combine satire with visual panache.
March 1, 2002... In her recent exhibition at New York's Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, Kathleen Gilje showed utterly convincing full-scale replicas of nudes by such art-historical superstars as Rembrandt, Rubens and Courbet. Yet despite an almost frightening...

Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Entering Anish Kapoor's exhibition of five new works, viewers could not help but smile as they came upon a luminously red sculpture that looked like a huge pair of lips, a stainless-steel form hanging by steel cables from the ceiling. Like many...

Julie Mehretu at The Project. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Julie Mehretu's first one-person show in New York was a graphic tour de force. Comprising four paintings plus 12 drawings which the artist refers to as "footnotes," the exhibition revealed Mehretu's ambitious approach to imagemaking as well as...

Frank Owen at Nancy Hoffman. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... If you want to put a whole lot into play in a given work of art (and a growing number of artists these days do), painting, especially abstract painting, can do the job perfectly well. A reformulated, more referential abstraction--one freed from...

Ian Wallace at American Fine Arts at P.H.A.G. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Inevitably, photographs of New York City street life have taken on a different cast since Sept. 11. Depictions of bustling masses of pedestrians and the ballet of cars and cabs enacted beneath looming skyscrapers provide an image of urbanism...

Leo Rubinfien at Robert Mann. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... At first glance, there is little to recommend Leo Rubinfien's photograph of a sleek glass wall that fills the frame, both sections of a double glass door angled out onto an ordinary day. The photographer excepted, no one seems to care about the...

Hellen van Meene at Matthew Marks. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Hellen van Meene's photographic portraits seem to be documentary, providing a window onto her vulnerable subjects' solitary desires and despairs. However, the images, always of adolescent females, are actually staged. For the most part, the...

Marco Brambilla at Henry Urbach architecture. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Marco Brambilla made his first film in Toronto at 16, worked in commercial and feature films in Los Angeles and New York and, since 1998, has focused on video and photography projects in New York. His show of three new video works, ambiguously...

Bill Beckley at Tony Shafrazi. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Bill Beckley showed 14 large vertical photographs in a more or less serial arrangement. The series is titled "Fourteen Stations." In each, the stems of six calla lilies are photographed close-up against monochrome grounds that vary from primary...

Per Kirkeby at Michael Werner. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Per Kirkeby's new multi-perspectival paintings are like images from a woodcutter's tale, told at the edge of the dark forest. The Danish-born Kirkeby is probably the most literary painter of the generation of European artists that includes his...

Alex Katz at PaceWildenstein, the Whitney Museum and Peter Blum. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... It is no discredit to the painter to learn that Alex Katz is said to have completed the lonely, heroic expanse of Ada's Garden (2000) in a day and a half. Or that he used a paper cartoon and the technique of "pouncing"--employed by muralists of...

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In abstract painting, the last vestige of illusionism is a sense of psychological interiority, as in the muffled darkness of a Reinhardt, the not-so-veiled labor intensiveness of Marden's early multipanel paintings, even the ash-light...

Louise Bourgeois at Cheim & Read. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Louise Bourgeois turned 90 last Christmas, and the questions that attend her work now include, inevitably, whispered doubts about her hands-on involvement in its creation. Well, judging from the sculptures themselves, there is a ferocious,...

Elizabeth Peyton at Gavin Brown's enterprise. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Elizabeth Peyton's latest portraits depict thin, modern, beautifully anguished young people--commonplace urban hipsters, for the most part--and fewer famous characters than her audience is used to seeing. Sometimes she works from photographs,...

Calvin Reid and Roger DeGennaro at Philip Alan. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The East Village spirit carries on beyond its 1980s heyday in exhibitions like this two-person show of Calvin Reid and Roger DeGennaro on Avenue B at Philip Alan Gallery, an unusual tenant/landlord collaboration. Gall Stein runs her storefront...

James Brown at Grant Selwyn. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Certain passages in James Brown's recent drawings seem to emerge from their supports like rubbings from a tombstone, revealing the artist's interest in process and the inherent possibilities of found materials. In the first section of this...

Philip Guston at David McKee. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Today the once popular sport of "Nixon-hating" seems a distant memory. But in the summer of 1971, painter Philip Guston and novelist Philip Roth bonded during weekly dinners in the Catskills over their shared revulsion for "Tricky Dick," who...

John Kalymnios at Caren Golden. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Optical illusion intersects with art history and popular culture in this intelligent body of work made in 2001 by John Kalymnios. The artist employs basic technology to explore visual experience. However, his lenses, mirrors and motors often...

Emiko Kasahara at White Box. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Since the mid-'80s, Emiko Kasahara's art has focused on femininity and feminism. Her early works were circumspect: her best-known pieces enclosed a carved marble rose within a glass box on a tiled pedestal, or pictured a blossom in cool...

Hiro Yamagata at Ace. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Stepping into Hiro Yamagata's recent installation was like entering a different reality. Spatially disorienting, the installation at times resembled a frozen dream, explosion or meteor shower. A tremendous technological feat, the ambitious work...

Tania Bruguera at LiebmanMagnan. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... For New Yorkers who have not caught Tania Bruguera's work abroad, this exhibition offered a first opportunity to view an installation by this much-discussed young Cuban artist. The work was conceived as a response to the poem "La Isla en Peso"...

Beatrice Mandelman at Gary Snyder. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... This seven-decade retrospective presented paintings and works on paper by Beatrice Mandelman (1912-1998). Born in Newark, she was active in the New York art scene of the 1930s. She associated with the old and new generations of painters, such...

Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Richard Kalina began his career in the days of the '70s Pattern and Decoration movement, creating intricate, dryly whimsical compositions with repeated motifs that included tornadoes, volcanoes, and black and white Scottie dogs. There was...

Flavio Garciandia at Ramis Barquet. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Cuban artist Flavio Garciandia's first New York exhibition attracted notice for its brash title, "I Insulted Brice Marden in Havana," which set the tone for this eclectic assortment of oil paintings. Claiming he has no artistic...

Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander at the Asia Society. (New York).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... "Conversations with Traditions" featured two female painters--one Indian, one Pakistani--who work in the miniature tradition. However, the exhibition demonstrates that "tradition" can be a loaded term. In the postcolonial world, traditional...

Diane Burko at Locks. (Philadelphia).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Diane Burko has been hunkered down on the front lines of contemporary landscape painting for over three decades, fearlessly doing her part to fortify the vitality of the genre. She has become known for her ability to take on the ephemeral in...

Elzbieta Sikorska at Gomez. (Baltimore).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Entering the gallery where Elzbieta Sikorska's large, graphite and chalk landscape drawings were presented, some viewers might, at first glance, have taken the works for merely accurate renderings of the wintry forest--conservative, even...

Aimee Beaubien at Carl Hammer. (Chicago).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Aimee Beaubien established her career during the culture wars of the early 1990s. Her controversial photographic series "Stimulating Objects" (1993), close-up images of vaginas penetrated by common objects, sparked national attention while the...

Gordon Newton at the Detroit Institute of Arts. (Detroit).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Gordon Newton, a central figure in Detroit's Cass Corridor group of the 1970s, is principally a sculptor, but this exhibition focused on his drawings. The show consisted of 150 works on paper created between 1970 and 1996. Made in series...

Meridel Rubenstein at LewAllen Contemporary. (Santa Fe).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Nautical imagery in contemporary art is often used to evoke forced migrations and political exile. In Meridel Rubenstein's most recent installation, from a work-in-progress titled "Joan's Arc/Vietnam," the artist adroitly brings a renewed...

Julie McManus at Patricia Correia. (Santa Monica).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In her upbeat, jovial paintings, newcomer Julie McManus liberates polka dots from dresses and paisleys from tablecloths, restoring them to the organic world from whence they came. Flower and plant motifs emerge from fabric patterns to flourish...

Alan Rath at Haines. (San Francisco).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In Alan Rath's recent exhibition of video sculptures, the primary subject appears to be the nature of observation, as suggested by digitized video representations of disembodied human eyes incorporated into multiple functioning mechanized...

Joel Sternfeld at SFMOMA. (San Francisco).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... For 20-odd years Joel Sternfeld has traveled around the United States with a view camera, photographing places, mostly built-up places with people in them. After a while he began to put his human subjects in the foreground, although his...

Craig Pozzi at Basil Hallward Gallery, Powell's City of Books. (Portland Ore.).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Craig Pozzi has created several major series of color photographs that are at once fascinating and funny. "Popular Events" documents local festivals in the hamlets of the western United States, "Looking for Mexico" probes clashing cultures in...

Gilbert & George at White [Cube.sup.2]. (London).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... This striking exhibition of recent large-scale photo works by Gilbert & George was a surprising departure for the veteran U.K. conceptualists. The show, titled "New Horny Pictures," featured 15 multipanel pieces made of self-portrait images and...

Jochen Flinzer at Thomas Rehbein. (Cologne).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Jochen Flinzer's works are autobiographical, yet only remotely personal. He selects postcards, maps and other memorabilia of his international travels, and marks them with embroidered texts or uses thread to systematically link aspects of the...

Ni Haifeng at Lumen Travo. (Amsterdam).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Ni Haifeng, a Chinese artist living in Amsterdam, treats such subjects as dislocation and identity, as is announced by the titles of the two series of photographs included in this show, "No-Man's-Land" and "Self-Portrait as a Part of Porcelain...

George Hadjimichalis at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. (Athens).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... This recent mid-career survey of Greek-born artist George Hadjimichalis filled the first floor of the newly opened National Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Athens. On view were large-scale paintings, sculptures, photo works and...

McNay Art Museum.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio has reopened after a $7.2-million, 14-month renovation. Improvements to the Spanish Colonial Revival-style mansion include a new heating and air-conditioning system, new doors and windows, and refurbished...

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, recently received a $1.5-million gift from the Louisa Stude Sarofim Charitable Trust.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, recently received a $1.5-million gift from the Louisa Stude Sarofim Charitable Trust. The funds will be used to endow the Carol Crow Photography Conservator Chair.

St. Louis's Forum for Contemporary Art has changed its name to Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... St. Louis's Forum for Contemporary Art has changed its name to Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The change coincides with the groundbreaking for its new building, located in the city's Grand Center adjacent to the recently opened Pulitzer...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has received a $1.9-million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Philadelphia Museum of Art has received a $1.9-million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The funds will be used to endow a new senior level scientist position within the museum's conservation department as well as to...

Obituaries. (Art World).(includes multiple articles)(Obituary)
March 1, 2002... Samuel Mockbee, 57, innovative, socially minded architect, died of leukemia on Dec. 30 in Jackson, Miss. A native Mississippian, he received his bachelor's degree in architecture from Auburn University in Alabama, in 1974. He worked...

Afghan bosses ok Buddhas. (Art World).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Afghanistan's new culture minister Raheen Makhdoom recently announced that the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban last year, will be restored. The iconophobic regime sparked international outrage when it dynamited the 154- and...

New NEA head dies unexpectedly. (Art World).(Michael P. Hammond, National Endowment for the Arts)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Michael P. Hammond, the newly appointed head of the National Endowment for the Arts [see "Artworld," Feb. '02], was found dead in his temporary residence in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29, apparently of natural causes. He was 69. Hammond had just...

Warhol Foundation gives 9/11 grants. (Art World).(Andy Warhol Foundation )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... On Jan. 24, the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced $600,000 in grants to organizations affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The emergency grants, ranging from $15,000 to $25,000,...

Revamped Montclair Art Museum debuts. (Art World).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... New Jersey's Montclair Art Museum opened its new wing and its newly expanded and renovated facility on Feb. 24. Designed by architect Richard Blinder, the $14.5-million project more than doubles the size of the original building from 20,000 to...

Longtime Museum of Modern Art curator Kynaston McShine has been named acting chief curator of painting and sculpture.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Longtime Museum of Modern Art curator Kynaston McShine has been named acting chief curator of painting and sculpture. He replaces Kirk Varnedoe, who joined the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. [see "Artworld," Nov....

Contemporary Art Center.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, senior curator at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, was recently appointed chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin.

New Orleans Museum of Art.(Steven Maklansky)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Steven Maklansky has been named assistant director for art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since 1993, he had been curator of photography at the museum. He replaces William A. Fagaly, who has retired.

Dallas Museum of Art.(Stephen G. Harrison, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Stephen G. Harrison, associate curator of decorative arts at the Dallas Museum of Art, is the new curator of decorative arts at the High Museum in Atlanta.

Milwaukee Art Museum.(Russell Bowman)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Russell Bowman, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, has announced his resignation, effective July 1. As director, he oversaw the construction of the museum's new Santiago Calatrava--designed building, which cost over $100 million. He joined...

Awards. (Art World).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Guggenheim Museum has announced its shortlist for the 2002 Hugo Boss Prize. The artists are Francis Alys, Olafur Eliasson, Hachiya Kazuhiko, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-a and Anri Sala, A book featuring the finalists' work will be published in...

Fun stuff at RISD shop. (Art World).(Rhode Island School of Design )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In an innovative approach to the traditional museum shop, the Rhode Island School of Design opened risd | works in downtown Providence, across from the school's campus, last October. The shop sells only works designed or created by RISD alumni...

The Pierpont Morgan Library.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York recently presented to the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission plans for a new $75-million renovation and expansion project designed by architect Renzo Piano. The scheme calls for a glass-enclosed...

Brooklyn Museum.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... In mid-January the Brooklyn useum caused a furor in the surrounding community by chopping down 42 cherry trees that lined the front of its building. The move is part of the first phase of the $55-million renovation project designed by James...

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has chosen London-based American architect Rick Mather to design a $79-million expansion. The project calls for more than 100,000 square feet of additional space to be added to the museum's existing 380,000...

The Tampa Museum of Art.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The Tampa Museum of Art has selected Uruguay-born, New York, based architect Rafael Vinoly to design a new building. Replacing the existing 22-year-old building, Vinoly plans a 125,000-square-foot structure that will be key to an ambitious...