Art in America articles from May 2002

Art in America archives from May 2002

New curator for Venice Biennale. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... On Mar. 21, the board of directors of the Venice Biennale named Francesco Bonami to be the curator of the international exhibition's 50th edition in 2003. The appointment marked an affirmation of the established selection guidelines, as the...

Art Chicago and beyond. (Front Page).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... This year marks the 10th anniversary of Art Chicago, the annual art fair produced by Thomas Blackman Associates, held May 1013 at Chicago's Navy Pier. Called the Chicago International Art Exposition from 1980 until 1993, when Blackman...

High-tech home for Folk Art. (Front Page).(American Fok Art Museum)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Since its inauguration last December, the American Folk Art Museum has been enthusiastically received by the public and press as a dramatic new addition to New York's architectural panorama. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, it...

Tales from Maastricht. (Front Page).(European Fine Art Fair)
May 1, 2002... For all its mannerly decorum--the teensy smoked-salmon sandwiches, the cappuccinos, the champagne, the chateau-bottled wines--the 15th annual European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) which opened in Maastricht, Holland, with a press reception on Mar. 5,...

A taste for triumph.(Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal)
May 1, 2002... Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal, trans, by the author with Laurie Hurwitz-Attias, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; 439 pages, $30. Two venues for art, the 1867 Paris Exposition...

Cai Guo-Qiang: illuminating the new China; a regular on the international biennial circuit, the New York-based Chinese artist recently dazzled Shanghai with installations, paintings, gunpowder "drawings" and a signature fire-work performance--thus sparking intense debate over contemporary cultural identity.
May 1, 2002... Cai Guo-Qiang's recent solo exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum was a homecoming of sorts. The artist, who left his native China in 1986 and has since become a familiar, widely lauded figure on the international circuit, has been back to...

Partners in art: an international exhibition examines the art of van Gogh and Gauguin in light of their contentious yet crucial relationship. Combining a wealth of significant loans, fresh technical data and an inventive installation, the show promises to become a landmark of both scholarly research and museumship.(Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South)
May 1, 2002... Anyone who missed the blockbuster "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South" as installed at the Art Institute of Chicago (the works are now at their second and final venue in Amsterdam) missed one of the best art-museum exhibitions ever....

Discovering the art of Brazil: with a broad, ambitious program and a surprising installation by the architect Jean Nouvel, the Guggenheim Museum presents a panorama of Brazilian art, from colonial to contemporary.(Brazil: Body & Soul)
May 1, 2002... The most ambitious and, by default, most comprehensive survey of Brazilian art to be hosted by a U.S. institution, "Brazil: Body & Soul," currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, emerged from a matrix of exhibitions that originated...

In concrete language: Brazil's thriving visual poetry tradition was the focus of a recent exhibition in Austin. Along with concrete poems, the show included videos, sound pieces and an installation.
May 1, 2002... Over the last decade or so, we in the U.S. have been learning more and more about the impressive achievements of post-World War II Brazilian art. Names that few would have recognized in the 1980s--Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel--are...

Lee Bul: cyborgs and karaoke: a traveling exhibition now at the New Museum in New York, highlights the recent karaoke-based work of a Korean artist known for her high-tech feminism and "global" fusions of culture.
May 1, 2002... Through her interventionist performances, her cyborg and monster sculptures, and now her karaoke installations, Lee Bul (b. 1964) has lately made an international name for herself. The Seoul-based artist has participated, for example, in group...

Alberto Giacometti and the endless search: a recent retrospective in Zurich and New York emphasized the dual nature of Giacometti's career: an early, swift assimilation of a range of experimental styles, followed by an obsessive, decades-long engagement with the human figure--a phase that, in the author's view, "occupies one continuous moment in time.".
May 1, 2002... The full-scale retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Museum of Modern Art was divided into two parts: before and after World War II. The first part began with work done when the artist was in his teens in Stampa, his hometown in the...

Giacometti's "Woman with Chariot": the sculpture and its accompanying painting occupy a crucial position in the artist's oevre, being anomalous in both their tenderness of expression and their oddness of execution.(Alberto Giacometti)
May 1, 2002... On the third-floor landing at MOMA, an enlarged photograph of Giacometti's studio in Maloja, Switzerland, showed the original plaster version of Woman with Chariot (1942-43) and a related grisaille painting done directly on the wide-planked...

Giacometti's thin figures: dead men walking; in which the author advances a psychoanalytic interpretation of the artist's gaunt postwar figures, postulating (among other factors) the lifelong impact of a series of family losses and the shattering revelations of the Holocaust.(Alberto Giacometti)
May 1, 2002... By the late 1940s, Alberto Giacometti was widely regarded as the artist who best represented mankind at midcentury. He had been a celebrated Surrealist sculptor, working in a semiabstract style, whose career was marooned in the mid-1930s, at...

Huang Yong Ping at Barbara Gladstone. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Straddling cultures and religions--in this case, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist--Paris-based, Chinese-born artist Huang Yong Ping impressively and impassively mixed and matched philosophies, iconographies and mediums in his third solo show in...

Tunga at Luhring Augustine. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In this exhibition, Rio-based artist Tunga presented four recent large-scale sculptures, plus a performance piece titled Make-Up Coincidence on the show's opening day. Two of the sculptures, Triade Trinade and Progeny of the Baby, served as...

Ghada Amer at Deitch Projects. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Ghada Amer's recent exhibition featured 57 canvas-covered boxes embroidered with written passages from a late 11th- to early 12th-century book called Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which was also the title of the piece. A scientific cataloguing of...

Rachel Feinstein at Marianne Boesky. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Visitors to Rachel Feinstein's New York solo debut had to pass beneath the artist's initials, in fancy curlicue script, hanging over the entry of Marianne Boesky's front gallery--an indication, either serious or tongue in cheek, of a precious,...

James Siena at Gorney Bravin + Lee. (New York).(art exhibition)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... James Siena showed 12 modest-size oil-on-aluminum patterned paintings in the gallery's large main room and, in the tiny project space, 39 drawings on pages torn from a small notebook (one painting was dated 1999; everything else was from 2000...

Frank Gillette at Universal Concepts Unlimited. (New York).(exhibition of digital art)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Frank Gillette's esthetic was shaped by Abstract Expressionism, which was at its height during his adolescence. He is still, he says, unwilling to abandon that idea of beauty. Nevertheless, for 30 years his work has featured video...

Odili Donald Odita at Florence Lynch and Riva. (New York).(exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Odili Donald Odita has earned a reputation for his colorful acrylic abstract paintings, in which slightly irregular bands, elongated triangles, stretched-out trapezoids and other off-kilter geometric forms extend horizontally across the...

Jason Middlebrook at Sara Meltzer and the New Museum. (New York).(exhibition of mixed-medium sculptures)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Four mixed-medium sculptures representing world-renowned museums were the centerpiece of "Visible Entropy," Jason Middlebrook's second exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery. The models presented an intersection between celebrated architecture and...

Richard Klein at Caren Golden. (New York).(art exhibition)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In the back gallery, which has the advantage of a wall full of north-facing windows, Richard Klein installed three large wall sculptures constructed of discarded metal-framed eyeglasses and cut-up shotgun barrels. The punning title of the show...

Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon, Weinberg. (New York).(exhibition of art installations, drawings and sculpture)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Mia Westerlund Roosen's recent show of works from 2001 included five drawings on vellum (most of them suggesting interventions in the earth), a smallish sculpture on a pedestal and a large floor work--all of which were overshadowed by a huge,...

Lawrence Gipe at Joseph Helman. (New York).(exhibition of photo-based portraits)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Lawrence Gipe continues to scout out vintage pictures from the 1930s and `40s as sources for an ironic art about the uses of propaganda in the creation of history. For "Schone" (Beauty), a 2001 series of photo-based portraits, he selected...

Olive Ayhens at Gary Tatintsian. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Olive Ayhens's nine expressionist oil paintings of New York City's skyscrapers are filtered through a wild and free imagination that takes license to bring the natural world into the concrete-and-steel jungle or, conversely, to interject the...

David Remfry at Neuhoff and P.S. 1. (New York).(exhibition of paintings)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Looking like a cross between Edgar Degas and cable television's Sex and the City, David Remfry's high-toned, high-fashion young women in gray, black and sepia whirl, twirl, stand, walk, dance and generally disport themselves with one another....

Rebecca Salter at Howard Scott. (New York).(exhibition of paintings)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Rebecca Salter's well-considered, deeply felt meditative paintings require time to be fully experienced. Her subtle color schemes are gently structured by parallel lines so fine that they make themselves known as atmosphere, giving depth to...

"Man Ray in America" at Francis M. Naumann. (New York).(exhibition of the photographer's work)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Man Ray (1890-1976) was born in Philadelphia, and lived in Brooklyn, Ridgefield, N.J., and then Manhattan before moving to France in 1921. He also worked in Hollywood from 1940 to 1950, then returned to France for the remainder of his life....

"Abstract Art from the Rio de la Plata" at the Americas Society. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In spite of the hostile cultural environment of the 1930s, the Rio de la Plata region of Uruguay and Argentina developed an avant-garde committed to abstraction and modern social ideas. Rigorously conceived, "Abstract Art from the Rio de la...

Ernest Briggs at Anita Shapolsky. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In Ernest Briggs's paintings from the late 1940s and the `50s, form is arrived at, almost as an after-thought, by gesture. A predilection for making content out of chaos informs all of his best work from the period. An excellent example is the...

Mark Rothko at Washburn and PaceWildenstein. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Mark Rothko's intriguing early works were featured recently in concurrent gallery shows. These exhibitions offered a fuller sense of the artist's development than his 1998 National Gallery retrospective, which included only 15 works from before...

Rita McBride at Alexander and Bonin. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In an exhibition titled "White Elephants and Albatrosses," Rita McBride continued to probe the relationship between art, architecture and public space with works at once mundane and clever. Some pieces reconnect the utopian to modernism by...

Kehnet Nielsen and Erik Steffensen at DCA. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... This show, at a Chelsea gallery devoted to Danish contemporary art, paired two Copenhagen artists, Kehnet Nielsen and Erik Steffensen. Nielsen was represented by three large paintings (each about 10 feet square) in the main gallery space and...

Philip Shinnick at Steven Harris Architects. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Philip Shinnick is a patient, consummate artist who has been showing in Provincetown, Mass., and in group shows in New York since the late 1980s. He makes wooden wall constructions, mostly painted, though he sometimes glues paper or thin shaped...

Marjorie Welish and Peter Downsbrough at Baumgartner. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The systemic paintings of Marjorie Welish and the drawings of Peter Downsbrough performed a deux in the exhibition "With/Without," cross-referential enough to justify the conceit of their pairing (with), and sufficiently separate in their...

Masao Yamamoto at Yancey Richardson. (New York).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Masao Yamamoto uses the Buddhist term "Nakazora" for the title of this series of photographs. The word means, among other things, "empty air," "hollow," "a state when feet do not touch the ground" and "the inability to decide between two...

John Phillips at Bodybuilder & Sportsman. (Chicago).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Painter John Phillips is a consummate formalist and a bit of a sentimentalist. Throughout his career, Phillips has mined the history of abstract painting, working with a visual vocabulary that pays homage to artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Brice...

Peter Stanfield at Zolla/Lieberman. (Chicago).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Peter Stanfield has fallen in love with his materials and his craft. He builds box-shaped, wall-hung, plastic and aluminum constructions, usually comprising two connected parts. We see fanciful texts in frames, dye-filled glass vials...

Eugene Newmann and Dana Newmann at Linda Durham. (Galisteo, N.M.).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... "Country Exercises" presented Eugene Newmann's paintings and monotypes with Dana Newmann's collages and assemblages in the couple's first joint show. Subtle and accomplished, Dana Newmann's works (ranging from 10 by 12 to 21 by 18 inches) are...

Kenneth Shorr at HazMat. (Tucson).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Wearing a bathrobe and sunglasses, a middle-aged man is sitting on a sofa in a dimly lit room reminiscing about an outrageous, hard-drinking friend named Francis. The anecdotes, recounted in a competent but still obviously fake English accent,...

Takako Yamaguchi at Jan Baum. (Los Angeles).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Takako Yamaguchi is one of L.A.'s most underrated mid-career artists, ingeniously mixing graphic and painterly motifs from Japan and the West with insouciant abandon. This recent show, titled "Storm Pattern," presented her boldest work to date....

Linda Ekstrom at Frumkin / Duval. (Santa Monica).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Religious faith is both a dominant theme in Linda Ekstrom's work and an evanescent force enshrouding it. Her sculptures oscillate between the twin poles of physicality and ephemerality, between knowing and believing. Among the most powerful of...

Rita Robillard at Elizabeth Leach. (Portland, Ore.).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The spirit of Lewis and Clark haunted Rita Robillard's exhibition of landscape paintings and mixed-medium collages. Not that a casual viewer would discern the pattern of an early 19th-century Corps of Discovery map beneath the layered pigments...

DeAnna Maganias at Rebecca M. Camhi. (Athens).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... DeAnna Maganias's first solo show, "Vaguely Familiar Places," consisted of a series of constructions depicting everyday environments whose familiarity is offset by the works' reduced size. Although the show comprised only six pieces, space was...

Tadanori Yokoo at the Hara Museum. (Tokyo).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Already famous in the 1960s and `70s for posters that were wild fusions of psychedelic influences and historic ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Tadanori Yokoo dramatically changed direction after seeing a Picasso exhibition 20 years ago: he made an...

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. (People).(Tom Finkelpearl, Queens Museum of Art)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Tom Finkelpearl, deputy director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center since 1999, is the new executive director of the Queens Museum of Art, replacing Laurene Buckley. From 1982 to `90, he was curator and director of P.S. 1's Clocktower Gallery,...

Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. (People).(Julian Raby)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Julian Raby, a faculty member of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in England, has been named director of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

Frick Art & Historical Center. (People).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... William B. Bodine, Jr., has been selected as executive director of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, replacing founding director DeCourcy E. McIntosh. Bodine recently served as interim executive director and chief curator of the...

Getty Research Institute. (People).(Gail Feigenbaum)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Gail Feigenbaum has been appointed associate director of programs at the Getty Research Institute. She was recently curator of painting at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Documenta. (People).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Carlos Basualdo, chief curator of exhibitions since 2000 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, recently resigned his post to focus on his duties as a co-curator of Documenta, opening June 8 in Kassel, Germany.

Norton Museum of Art. (Museum News).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., has received a gift of 52 works of American and European Minimalist art from the collection of Palm Beach residents Catherine Brownstone and her husband, Gilbert, who is the former director of...

The Rhode Island School of Design has announced that the firm FleetBoston Financial recently donated to the school a portion of its Westminster Street facility in Providence. (Museum News).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The Rhode Island School of Design has announced that the firm FleetBoston Financial recently donated to the school a portion of its Westminster Street facility in Providence, including a historic banking hall, the second floor and part of the...

Obituaries. (Artworld).(Jean-Paul Riopelle)(Obituary)
May 1, 2002... Jean-Paul Riopelle; 78, leading Canadian abstract painter, died Mar. 12 on the lie aux Grues, near Quebec City. Born and educated in Montreal, he moved to Paris in the `40s, where he became friends with Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro and Samuel...

New Sculpture Park for Michigan. (Artworld).(Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Mich., debuts its 30-acre outdoor sculpture site on May 16. Part of a 125-acre complex of gardens and exhibition spaces founded in 1995 by Michigan collector and philanthropist...

SFMOMA selects new director. (Artworld).(San Francisco Museum of Modern Art appoints Neal Benezra)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Neal Benezra has been named director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, effective Aug. 1. A Bay Area native with degrees from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley and Davis, Benezra has been deputy director...

Manifesta opens in Frankfurt. (Artworld).
May 1, 2002... Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art kicks off on May 25 in Frankfurt [to Aug. 25]. The fourth installment of the itinerant exhibition--previously held in Rotterdam, Luxemburg and Ljubljana--is curated by Iara Boubnova of the...

Bloomberg Scuttles Museum's move to Tweed Courthouse. (Artworld).(Michael Bloomberg, Museum of the City of New York)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... In mid-March, Mayor Michael Bloomberg nixed a deal made by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani to relocate the Museum of the City of New York, currently on upper Fifth Ave., to the newly renovated Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan [see "Front Page,"...

Commission hikes at auction houses. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... On Apr. 1, Sotheby's raised its buyer's premium to 19.5 percent of the first $100,000 of the hammer price, and 10 percent of the price in excess of $100,000. Previously, the commission was 20 percent on the first $15,000 and 15 percent on sales...

Awards. (Artworld).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Israeli-born video and installation artist Irit Batsry is the winner of the second Bucksbaum Award, given to an artist included in the Whitney Biennial exhibition. The prize includes $100,000 and an artist residency and exhibition at the...