Art in America articles from March 2008

Art in America archives from March 2008

Met director to retire.(FRONT PAGE)(Guy-Philippe Lannes de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
March 1, 2008... It's the end of an era for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Jan. 8, longtime director Philippe de Montebello announced his intention to retire by Dec. 31, after more than 30 years as the head of one of the world's most prominent art museums....

Brits scramble for Russian show.(FRONT PAGE)(From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925)
March 1, 2008... Relations between Russia and Britain have been looking very Cold War these days, from a standoff related to the murder in London of former K.G.B. officer Alexander Litvinenko by another Russian agent to the near cancellation of an exhibition of...

The price of free admission.(FRONT PAGE)(museums in the United Kingdom and France)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Are the French becoming less cultured than their yogurt? Quelle horreur! In an attempt to bring in more visitors, France is currently experimenting with free admission to the permanent collections of 18 national museums. It's an idea that...

Classical antiquities coming and going.(FRONT PAGE)(Metropolitan Museum of Art returns antiquities to Italian government)
March 1, 2008... In an agreement with the Italian government, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in mid-January returned to Italy 21 antiquities whose provenance has been questioned in recent years. Most prominent among the works is the famous Euphronios krater...

Santa Fe Biennial taking chances.(FRONT PAGE)
March 1, 2008... Organized by independent curator Lance Fung, this year's SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the seventh installment, on view June 22-Oct. 26, promises to be full of surprises. The list of the 27 participating artists from around the world, recently...

New chief for Venice Biennale.(FRONT PAGE)(Paolo Baratta)
March 1, 2008... Emerging from their first meeting on Jan. 16, 2008, the board of the Venice Biennale, led by newly appointed president Paolo Baratta, announced the names of four of the six artistic directors who will guide the institution's upcoming...

East River waterfalls.(FRONT PAGE)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... It is surprisingly easy for New Yorkers to forget that they live on the coast, and never more than a few miles from a body of water. Danish artist Olafur Eliasson intends to change that, at least for four months this summer and fall, by drawing...

NEA budget boost for '08.(FRONT PAGE)(National Endowment for the Arts)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... On Dec. 26, 2007, President Bush signed the fiscal year 2008 Omnibus appropriations bill allocating $144.7 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, an increase of $20.3 million over last year's funding. Representing a 16-percent...

NYC Art Fairs: ready, set, go ...(FRONT PAGE)
March 1, 2008... On Mar. 27, the Armory Show kicks off its tenth presentation on Manhattan's West Side. This year, 160 galleries will set up on Pier 94 [through Mar. 30], the same venue that brought the fair together under a single roof last year. To celebrate...

Close ready for his close-up.(FRONT PAGE)(documentary film about Chuck Close)(Movie review)
March 1, 2008... This has been an exceptionally fruitful season for Chuck Close. His name has appeared recently on everything from theater marquees to wine labels. A version of his exhibition of paintings and tapestries, "Family and Others," which appeared last...

Art sweepstakes: a recent exhibition of Turner Prize winners provided an opportunity to reflect on the merits of the widely varied and increasingly numerous awards given to artists.(ISSUES & COMMENTARY)
March 1, 2008... The Nobel Prizes and the Oscars[R] (I've attached that noxious little trademark sign, so don't sue me, Hollywood) are the big kahunas of modern honorific awards. The Nobels--named for the guy who invented dynamite and supposedly felt so much...

Everywhere and all at once: Performa 07, the second installment of the new biennial, brought a staggering range of live events to venues large and small throughout New York City.(PERFORMANCE)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Brainchild of the indefatigable art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, who was everywhere all the time at this round as at the last, the second, significantly expanded biennial Performa performance series...

Mapping new territory: with the relocated New Museum now open, gallery colonizing of Manhattan's former tenement district continues apace.(REPORT FROM THE LOWER EAST SIDE)
March 1, 2008... The move is on. Some 30 galleries now operate on Manhattan's Lower East Side, about double the number that existed 18 months ago. Some are fledgling efforts by ambitious young dealers looking to set up shop but skeptical of Chelsea's notorious...

After the fair(s): the latest Art Basel Miami Beach expanded with sub-venues for the new and super-new, while also sparking satellite fairs, exhibitions and commercial ventures.(REPORT FROM MIAMI)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Opening day of the sixth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) was declared "Samuel Keller Day" by Miami Beach mayor Matti Herrera Bower, who awarded Keller, the fair's founding director, the city's Medal of Honor....

NY galleries.(Directory)(Calendar)
March 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 Web site: www.aperture.org Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 March 7-May...

Where it's happening: notoriously resistant to museum presentation, Allan Kaprow's work is being "reinvented" (his term) for a stimulating and timely traveling survey opening this month at its final stop, in Los Angeles.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For most historians, the defining text of Allan Kaprow's early career-if not the defining text of his entire oeuvre--is his 1958 article on "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," in which he read the Abstract Expressionist...

Allan Kaprow: art & life: three geographical and generational points of view on the long, influential yet insufficiently known career of the inventor of Happenings.(Discussion)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The following is the text of a panel discussion that took place at the Jewish Museum, New York, on Nov. 8, 2007; the transcript has been lightly edited and slightly condensed for publication. The event was...

The dark side of Georges Seurat.(Georges Seurat's exhibitions)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The disparity between the paintings and the drawings of Georges Seurat ranks as one of the most puzzling phenomena in early modern art. The mature drawings, from 1881 onward, are almost without exception done in...

The strategist: balancing his photo-appropriations with large, lush paintings steeped in modernist ambition, a major Richard Prince retrospective tweaks his reputation for artistic brinksmanship. Or does it?
March 1, 2008... As I was waiting to get my coat after viewing the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim, the man in front of me, old enough to have sampled the Borscht Belt in his youth, exclaimed to the attendant, "What a sense of humor! He's a...

The sun-baked avant-garde: a traveling exhibition considers the life and times of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the legendary expatriates at the center of a vibrant circle of artists and writers in France in the 1920s.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Crammed into a few years at the height of the Roaring Twenties, or les annees folles, as the period is known in France, Gerald Murphy's career as an artist was like a comet--white-hot, then gone in a flash. Picasso,...

Eye of the heart: in her portrait assemblages of people both famous and obscure, Marisol finds the human vulnerability common to all her subjects and, in so doing, reveals us--not without sympathy--to ourselves.(Marisol Escobar)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] An opera singer who had to keep silent for a week to preserve his voice later told me that during that time he saw pain in the faces around him, pain he'd never noticed before. The sculptor Marisol, now 77, has lived...

"Introducing" Reigl: well into the seventh decade of her career, the highly regarded Hungarian painter Judit Reigl is enjoying her first exhibition in New York.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Having survived World War II and the Stalinist rule imposed in 1948, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvar, 1923) escaped from her native Hungary in 1950 and settled in Paris, where she remained until moving to nearby Marcoussis...

Tino Sehgal at Marian Goodman.
March 1, 2008... Almost all the conditions of Tino Sehgal's performance This Situation sound just a little sophomoric. Half a dozen youngish people hang around the gallery, engaged in an interminable, desultory discussion spurred by great-thinker sound bites...

Arno Rafael Minkkinen at Barry Friedman.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Since 1971, Arno Rafael Minkkinen has created a remarkable series of nude self-portraits by positioning himself in and around nature in implausible-seeming poses, for example, balanced in a headstand on the...

Willoughby Sharp at Mitchell Algus.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This recent exhibition focused on a series of provocative and sometimes fierce performances that Willoughby Sharp presented during the 1970s in the U.S. and abroad. A fixture on the New York art scene from the late...

Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Do Ho Suh's simultaneous installations at this gallery's two locations were a study in contrasts: storm-tossed and serene, fiery colors and watery ones, brittle plastic and filmy cloth. Cause and Effect (2007), the...

Robert Beck at CRG.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Through architectural intervention in the gallery, Robert Beck directed viewers' thoughts to the transience of this exhibition and to the concept behind it: "diagnostic drawings," which assist psychologists in the...

Urs Fischer at Gavin Brown's Enterprise.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For his latest outing at Gavin Brown, the young Swiss-born, New York- and Zurich-resident sculptor Urs Fischer, employing heavy machinery and a team of assistants, removed the concrete gallery floor and excavated the...

Judy Fox at P.P.O.W.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A skilled technician with a flair for theatrical presentation, Judy Fox has earned kudos for her well-wrought, painstakingly realistic figurative sculptures, typically in terra-cotta painted with rich yet muted...

Wolfgang Laib at Sean Kelly.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Wolfgang Laib's recent exhibition included rice, ghee and photos of religious sites in India. While Laib is known for his laborious practices (such as collecting pollen for his installations) and his attention to the...

Ben Grasso at Thierry Goldberg.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With their loose, quick brushwork and evidence of multiple changes in imagery during the course of completion, Ben Grasso's paintings have the slapdash look of work by a young artist trying to amp up production for...

Ulrika Minami Warmling at Stellan Holm.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Friends and lovers, subcultures and the fringes of society are familiar artistic subject matter. In her large-scale paintings, Stockholm-based Ulrika Minami Warmling depicts her friends dressed in Goth attire....

William Beckman at Forum.
March 1, 2008... William Beckman's achievement as practitioner of a kind of hyper-realistic portraiture has little to do with photographic veracity. It is grounded on familiarity with Northern Renaissance painting. (In a catalogue essay for this recent show,...

Red Grooms at Marlborough.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Red Grooms is a master of outsized, densely packed and rollicking takes on city life. His recent paintings (200607), shown at Marlborough's uptown venue, don't deliver the three-dimensional ruckus of his...

Mark Sheinkman at Von Lintel.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mark Sheinkman has been mining the richness of graphite and the permutations of line since the early 1990s, in works that run the gamut from 30-foot-long drawings to three-dimensional wall works of rolled canvas or...

Beatrice Caracciolo at Charles Cowles.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "I am obsessed with the sea," Beatrice Caracciolo said in a recent conversation--an obsession evident in her exhibition 'Water Marks," which included mixed-medium works on paper that translate the hypnotic motion of...

Anton Wurth at C.G. Boerner.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One of the cleverest, most stirring shows I've seen recently was also the most arcane. Mounted at C.G. Boerner, known mainly for old master prints--though the gallery has occasionally, if only recently, ventured into...

Carlo Maria Mariani at Francis M. Naumann.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Roman-born, New York-based painter Carlo Maria Mariani is widely recognized as a key figure in Italy's avant-garde of the 1970s and '80s. He is best known today for a conflation of classical technique and quotations...

William Carroll at Elizabeth Harris.
March 1, 2008... William Carroll, who recently earned an MFA at Queens College, is the former director of this gallery and had worked as an arts administrator for many years prior to that. His first solo exhibition here included over three dozen very small...

Cheryl Donegan at Oliver Kamm/5BE.
March 1, 2008... In a published artist's statement, Cheryl Donegan compared Robert Bresson's film A Man Escaped, which concerns a plan for fleeing prison, to the problem of the artist in the studio. This glimmeringly brilliant artist has been interrogating...

Richard Hambleton at Woodward.
March 1, 2008... Canadian-born painter Richard Hambleton made a splash, quite literally, in New York in the early 1980s with his black-splattered graffiti images on buildings throughout the Lower East Side. These "shadow" paintings, clandestinely executed with...

Tucker Nichols at Zieher Smith.
March 1, 2008... The San Francisco-based artist Tucker Nichols makes small drawings that manage to be modest and far-reaching at the same time. Scrawled on note cards, bits of brown paper and other discarded materials are marks both innocent and knowing,...

David Mann at McKenzie.
March 1, 2008... David Mann's exquisitely rendered works seem to represent gravity-defying phenomena that could be unfolding on a galactic or molecular level. The 10 glowing canvases in his third show at McKenzie feature flexible white loops and ellipses that...

Serena Bocchino at Tria.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Blue," a show by painter Serena Bocchino, demonstrated a great affection for the color of the sea and sky in 10 enamel-and oil-on-canvas paintings (all works 2006 or '07). In most cases, the compositions consist of...

Robert Selwyn at DFN.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Houses and Newscasters," Robert Selwyn's recent exhibition, his second at DFN, contained 12 oil paintings, six addressing each of the title's subjects. These imaginative works combine the artist's long-standing...

Matthew Blackwell at Edward Thorp.
March 1, 2008... You can fairly hear the lonesome fiddles and smell the piney trees in Matthew Blackwell's recent +paintings, 21 of which constituted this seasoned artist's third New York solo show, "Over Yonder in the Minor Key." The work is soaked through...

Moon Beom at Kim Foster.
March 1, 2008... In his fourth New York solo, Seoul-based painter Moon Beom presented eight paintings poised between abstraction and figuration. All the pieces come from a series whose title, "Possible Worlds," suggests both the imagined and the actual. The...

Rhonda Zwillinger at Pavel Zoubok.
March 1, 2008... Those familiar with work from the 1980s by the then East Village-associated Rhonda Zwillinger might recognize in her new mixed-medium sculptures the same tendency to over-the-top glitter, still achieved with encrustations of shiny baubles but...

Imi Hwangbo at Miller Block.
March 1, 2008... Imi Hwangbo's three-dimensional drawings consist of aligned layers of white, translucent Mylar--sometimes as many as 30. Each layer is hand cut with incredible precision in allover stylized floral or geometric designs and mounted with slight...

Robert Brady at the Fuller Craft Museum.
March 1, 2008... This exhibition of Berkeley-based Robert Brady's carved and assembled wooden figures was organized by the Palo Alto Art Center in 2006 and traveled to two other California venues and to Washington, D.C. before arriving in Massachusetts. It...

Astrid Bowlby at Gallery Joe.
March 1, 2008... Many of Astrid Bowlby's 18 new ink drawings depict close-up, detailed views of imagined foliagelike forms: tiny flowers, roots and underbrush. Grounded in a minimalist esthetic, each is constructed with intricately sinuous black lines that...

Delanie Jenkins at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
March 1, 2008... The provocative work of Pittsburgh-based Delanie Jenkins is derived from the detritus of daily existence that she obsessively collects. Her exhibition, created from clementine peels, radish roots, paper towels and her own hair cuttings, entices...

George Thiewes at Evo.
March 1, 2008... At the beginning of his artistic career in the late 1960s and early '70s, Arizona-based sculptor George Thiewes was an active member of the Studio Glass Movement. After working in glass for over 20 years, Thiewes changed course in the mid-'80s,...

Gerald Davis at Black Dragon Society.
March 1, 2008... This reviewer needed a minute to catch her breath after ducking into an exhibition of recent figurative work by Gerald Davis. One usually cool colleague had to leave immediately; we quickly warned off another who had children in tow. Titled...

Amy Adler at Acme.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During the past decade, Amy Adler has surveyed many of the roles, guises and surrogate selves available to young women in contemporary American culture. She doesn't critique the dynamic of role models so much as...

Connie Zehr at Claremont Graduate University.
March 1, 2008... For over 30 years, Connie Zehr has been "sculpting" by pouring sand directly onto gallery floors. The earliest of these sand works consisted of identical diminutive mounds topped with upright eggs arranged in a minimalist grid--a kind of...

Wolfgang Paalen at Frey Norris.
March 1, 2008... In 1937 the Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen invented "fumage," a technique that consists of passing a candle under a freshly prepared surface and then interpreting the resulting smoky design. Andre Breton, writing the preface to Paalen's...

Victoria Haven at the Frye Art Museum and Howard House.
March 1, 2008... Over a decade ago, Victoria Haven's production was generally confined to oil painting. However, after returning to Seattle from graduate school at Goldsmiths College, London, she began creating delicate wall-hung constructions of cut paper,...

Lilian Daubisse at Arums.
March 1, 2008... In his first solo exhibition, Lilian Daubisse revealed the depth of his imagination as well as his talent as a craftsman. Born in 1970, he graduated with a degree in design in 1996 from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. During the ensuing...

Nanne Meyer at Barbara Wien.
March 1, 2008... Drawing can be a kind of common ground on which to compare the conceptions of drastically different artists better known for other things. Berlin-based Nanne Meyer, however, has devoted herself to drawing above all, giving the medium the full...

Art schools directory.(Directory)(List)
March 1, 2008... NEW ENGLAND The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University Office of Admissions, 700 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02215 617 585 6710, toll-free: 800-773 0494 x6710 www.aiboston.edu * admissions@aiboston.edu Professional...

The Whitney Museum of American Art closed its Altria branch on 42nd Street on Jan. 29.(Museum News)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Whitney Museum of American Art closed its Altria branch on 42nd Street on Jan. 29. The Altria Group, formerly known as the Phillip Morris Companies, opened its ground-floor atrium in 1983 to be used as a venue for changing exhibitions of...

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently received a $10-million gift from the Jane and Marc Nathanson Foundation to be used to support the museum's contemporary art acquisitions program.(Museum News)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently received a $10-million gift from the Jane and Marc Nathanson Foundation to be used to support the museum's contemporary art acquisitions program. In honor of the gift from Mrs. Nathanson, a longtime...

The International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has scheduled the grand opening of its new building for Mar. 30.(Museum News)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has scheduled the grand opening of its new building for Mar. 30. The $12-million, three-story, glass-and-brick "green" facility, designed by Robert A.M. Stern...

Obituaries.(ARTWORLD)(Obituary)
March 1, 2008... Allison Eckardt Ledes, 53, editor of The Magazine Antiques (part of Brant Publications), died of cancer at her home in New York on Jan. 8. Born in Port Chester, N.Y., Eckardt studied at Vassar, where she earned a B.A. in art history. She joined...

Michael Goldberg 1924-2007.(ARTWORLD)(Obituary)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Michael Goldberg, one of the last of the early Abstract Expressionists, died on Dec. 30 at age 83. Hard working, hard living and remarkably productive, Goldberg had over 100 solo shows to his credit in the United...

Four L.A. museums targeted for loot.(ARTWORLD)(The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, the Mingei International Museum in San Diego and the Silk Roads Gallery in LA.)
March 1, 2008... On the morning of Jan. 24, federal agents descended upon four Southern California museums and a gallery that were at the center of a five-year undercover investigation into the looting of art from Thailand, Myanmar and China, as well as from...

Drilling threatens Spiral Jetty.(ARTWORLD)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... As this issue went to press, news was breaking about a proposal to drill for oil and natural gas underneath the Great Salt Lake, which could possibly threaten Robert Smithson's seminal 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty. The application to drill...

Bruce Nauman has been chosen to represent the U.S. at the 2009 Venice Biennale.(People)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Bruce Nauman has been chosen to represent the U.S. at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The exhibition will be organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor, curators, respectively, of contemporary and modern art.

Norman Rosenthal, director of exhibitions at London's Royal Academy of Arts, is stepping down to become a freelance curator.(People)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Norman Rosenthal, director of exhibitions at London's Royal Academy of Arts, is stepping down to become a freelance curator. He will continue to consult with the Academy as well as other art institutions. Rosenthal, who joined the Academy as...

The Phillips Collection.(People)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has appointed Dorothy Kosinski as its new director, effective May 1. She has been on staff at the Dallas Museum of Art since 1995, most recently as senior curator of painting and sculpture. She...

Parrish Art Museum.(People)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Terrie Sultan, director since 2000 of the Bluffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, has been named director of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., effective in April. She succeeds Trudy C. Kramer, who retired after...

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts has given 12 grants of $25,000 each to artists in various fields.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Foundation for Contemporary Arts has given 12 grants of $25,000 each to artists in various fields. Among the winners are Tamy Ben-Tor, Cameron Jamie, Wang Jianwei, Ohad Meromi and Allison Smith.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has presented 25 painters and sculptors with grants of $25,000 each.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Joan Mitchell Foundation has presented 25 painters and sculptors with grants of $25,000 each. They are: Douglas Bourgeois, Iona Rozeal Brown, Margarita Cabrera, Alexander Couwenberg, Dahlia Elsayed, Nancy Evans, Chris Garofalo, Guy Goodwin,...

The Creative Capital Foundation has awarded its 2008 grants to 52 artists representing 41 projects in film/ video and visual arts.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The Creative Capital Foundation has awarded its 2008 grants to 52 artists representing 41 projects in film/ video and visual arts. Following initial awards of $10,000, recipients may receive additional funds, as their projects develop, of as...

St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum recently chose architect Rem Koolhaas to redesign its art displays.(Museum News)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum recently chose architect Rem Koolhaas to redesign its art displays. No new structure will be built, but Koolhaas plans to modernize the installations beginning with the rooms for Chinese and Islamic art....