Art in America articles from May 2006

Art in America archives from May 2006

New museum for UT-Austin.(FRONT PAGE)
May 1, 2006... The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, named for arts patron and former chairman of the university's board of regents, opened one of its two new buildings on Apr. 30, after this issue went to press. The...

Hispanic Society to relocate.(FRONT PAGE)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... New York's Hispanic Society of America has announced plans to move its stellar collection of Spanish and Latin American art, decorative art, photographs, rare books and manuscripts from the upper reaches of Manhattan to a more central location....

Chinese contemporary art prices skyrocket.(FRONT PAGE)
May 1, 2006... In recent years, enthusiasm for avant-garde Chinese art has grown by leaps and bounds among collectors, curators and critics here and in Europe. With Sotheby's wildly successful auction of contemporary Asian art in New York on Mar. 31, these...

Dali or not Dali?(FRONT PAGE)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Ever a favorite among forgers and shysters, Salvador Dali created a vast array of work, copies of which, plus outright fakes, have been at the center of countless scams. Now scholars and collectors have a place to turn to for help. The Salvador...

New home for African diaspora museum.(FRONT PAGE)(Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts )
May 1, 2006... After a year and a half without a home, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MOCADA) will reopen May 18 in the James E. Davis 80 Arts Building on Hanson Place in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. In 2004, Laurie Cumbo, MOCADA's founder and...

The Armory Show.(New York's Art Fairs)
May 1, 2006... In 12 years, the Armory Show, which originated as the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair with artworks displayed on beds at New York's Gramercy Hotel, has become an institution. This year's installment, mounted for the sixth time on...

Pulse.(Satellite Shows)
May 1, 2006... The Pulse Contemporary Art Fair made its New York debut in the 69th Regiment Armory, site of the original 1913 Armory Show (and namesake of the current West Side incarnation) after a successful initial outing at Art Basel Miami Beach last...

Scope.(Satellite Shows)
May 1, 2006... This year Scope New York swapped its habitual hotel setting for a 30,000-square-foot industrial-style building on 46th Street, just blocks away from the Armory. Over four days, 14,000 visitors and sales of $7.5 million were recorded. During the...

DiVA.(Satellite Shows)
May 1, 2006... For the second year running, DiVA, the Digital and Video Art Fair, was held at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Battery Park City. Organized by Frere Independent, a nonprofit arts enterprise, and curated by Elga Wimmer, the event featured 40...

L.A. Art in New York.(Satellite Shows)
May 1, 2006... Feeling underrepresented in the other New York fairs, 16 of Los Angeles's top galleries banded together to organize, in only four months, the first installment of L.A. Art in New York. The fair attracted over 2,000 visitors--mostly invited...

The consequences of hanging.(Art and the Power of Placement)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Art and the Power of Placement, by Victoria Newhouse, New York, Monacelli Press, 2005; 304 pages, $50. To state with authority what everyone knows but few realize can be a transforming event. An issue liminally present but never quite outed...

Down East: Manhattan's Lower East Side has become a mecca for independent, highly innovative new galleries.(REPORT FROM NEW YORK)
May 1, 2006... Given its perhaps unprecedented concentration of galleries, Chelsea has become such a magnet for gallery goers intent on seeing as much art per hour as humanly possible that it is easy to overlook exhibition venues elsewhere in the city. SoHo,...

The pictures he took: two exhibitions explore John Szarkowski's abiding interests as a photographer, including portraiture, architecture, and--especially--the pleasures of rural life.(PHOTOGRAPHY I)
May 1, 2006... During John Szarkowski's tenure as chief of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, little was known of his earlier work as a photographer, a practice he largely abandoned in 1962 and resumed on his retirement in...

Eyes wide open: John Szarkowski: an influential photography curator and writer discusses some of the medium's key figures and exhibitions.(PHOTOGRAPHY II)(Interview)
May 1, 2006... John Szarkowski was director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1962 to 1991 (succeeding Edward Steichen). During his tenure he mounted major exhibitions of such important artists as Walker Evans,...

Malibu and a Villa: the Getty Museum's original building, recently reopened and now exclusively dedicated to the antiquities collection, benefits from a sensitive renovation and augmented surroundings that enhance its aura of the Classical past.(ARCHITECTURE)
May 1, 2006... Critics have long panned the Getty Villa in Malibu as the bagatelle of a rich man suffering a delusional overdose of megalomania. But 30 years after the building opened to mixed reviews, it's time to look again: with a transformative addition...

Traveling light: investigating the Cooper-Hewitt Museum's design collection, Yinka Shonibare has brought together an enticing selection of objects related to travel in the days of the Grand Tour.(ARTIST/CURATOR)
May 1, 2006... It was a radical act when Andy Warhol rifled through the storerooms at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970. The show that emerged, "Raid the Icebox," looked nothing like an art exhibition, although it perfectly reflected his...

Israel's traumas and dreams: a mega-exhibition titled "The New Hebrews" used a combination of art and documentary material to tackle a century of Israeli culture and history.(REPORT FROM BERLIN)
May 1, 2006... Exhibitions at the juncture of art and history are curious hybrids, yet they continue to play a serious role in the curatorial repertoire within art museums. Generally, such synthetic displays concern themselves with the formation of communal...

N.Y. galleries.(Directory)
May 1, 2006... Chelsea A.I.R. Gallery 511 West 25th Street, #301, NY, NY 10001 Tel: 212-255-6651 E-mail: info@airnyc.org Website: www.airnyc.org Tuesday-Saturday: 11:00-6:00 May 2-27: Gallery 1: "The Versailles Project," new work...

Willie Cole: the energy of objects: as seen in three exhibitions, Cole's work reflects an abiding interest in African and diaspora culture, and an astute eye for the latent symbolic value of everyday materials.
May 1, 2006... On its face, the art of Willie Cole seems Ito recuperate the primitivism that informed so many landmarks of early modern painting and sculpture. Not unlike seminal examples from Picasso or Matisse, Cole's works often emulate the distinctive...

Demon iconographer: recent exhibitions in Rome and London and a mural commissioned by a new museum in his native Naples provide opportunities to catch up on the peripatetic career of Francesco Clemente.(Critical essay)
May 1, 2006... Francesco Clemente's studio by moonlight. We are in his New York loft on a cold January night in 2006; I have come to see paintings that are destined for a show in Rome, but because the studio is so dimly lit, the works are spectral. With their...

Full-metal fabrics: Nigerian-based artist El Anatsui, recently the subject of several U.S. exhibitions, makes visually rich, culturally resonant sculptures from cast-off aluminum bottle tops.
May 1, 2006... The profile of contemporary African visual culture has certainly risen in the art world over the last few years, but a single medium--photography--has garnered most of the attention. While there are a number of African artists whose work can be...

Spero's cry: in two recent exhibitions, one of which featured a large-scale printed-paper frieze, Nancy Spero grappled with the legacy of the Vietnam War, ancient iconography and personal loss.
May 1, 2006... This has been a great art season for those who love Nancy Spero's work: over the winter she had two major bodies of work up in New York at the same time. One, at the Drawing Center, was a wall-printed installation inspired by and, in part,...

Lost in translation.(Museum of Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horses)
May 1, 2006... Most Westerners, whether they have visited China or not, have some notion of the spectacular contents of the Museum of Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horses located in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Its nearly 7,000 life-size human and...

Biala's fragmented interiors: in a career that spanned much of the 20th century, Paris-based American painter Biala brought a quirky formalist sensibility to traditional genres. A recent New York gallery show surveyed her work.
May 1, 2006... The resurgence of interest in representational painting that has been under way for a number of years shows no sign of slackening. Galleries and museums are full of comic- and cartoon-inspired artists (Raymond Pettibon, Yoshitomo Nara),...

Babes in Spiritland: artist and musician Marnie Weber taps the dark side of folktales in open-ended narratives featuring human and animal characters. A recent survey in Los Angeles included a selection of her videos, photocollages and costumes from the past five years.(Critical essay)
May 1, 2006... Children absorb fairy tales without analysis, unquestioningly assimilating these often strange stories of redemption, risk and abandonment. in contemporary art, it is rare to encounter works that inspire a similar kind of naive, primal trust....

Roxy Paine at James Cohan.(NEW YORK)
May 1, 2006... In the Grateful Dead's rousing Reagan-era anthem Throwing Stones, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir sings, "We will leave this place an empty stone, or this shining ball of blue we can call our home." Bad Planet (200 5), a sculpture in Roxy Paine's...

Tracey Emin at Lehmann Maupin.(sculpture exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Anyone thinking about Tracey Emin's work can't help but take her tumultuous life into consideration, because to date it's been her main subject matter. We know about her childhood in the small, British seaside town of Margate; that she was...

Matthew Weinstein at Sonnabend.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Matthew Weinstein's recent exhibition at Sonnabend, continuing his longtime interest in images of blood and death, brought heightened allure to the reminders of life's transiency represented by the skull and bones of the memento mori. With a...

Geoffrey Hendricks at Pavel Zoubok.(paintings exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... A sense of quiet awe at how quickly life passes lingered in Geoffrey Hendricks's deceptively simple show--expressed, for instance, in the evanescent clouds populating the watercolors of skies that appeared throughout. In Sky/Slate Wall #8/New...

Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read.(painting exhibition)
May 1, 2006... To make a stroke of paint seem equivalent to a shaft of light is no small bit of magic, especially when it lacks any particular chromatic association with luminescence, and moreover is buried deep in a thicket of other paintstrokes. Pulling off...

Jin Meyerson at Zach Feuer.(paintings exhibition)
May 1, 2006... "High Cholesterol Moment" was Korean-born, U.S.-raised Jin Meyerson's second solo exhibition at Zach Feuer. Each recent painting, based on collages, includes a stunning array of imagery in jarring combinations. Disparate scenes--color and black...

Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks.(sculpture exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Rebecca Warren's New York solo debut, this show featured new cartoonily expressionistic sculptures made of unfired reinforced clay on a considerably smaller scale than the works for which she has achieved renown in her native U.K. Trolling the...

Marvin E. Newman at Silverstein Photography.
May 1, 2006... This exhibition included well over 100 of Marvin E. Newman's vintage black-and-white photographs, providing insight into his interests while reserving his color work for another day. Much admired for his achievement in the highly competitive...

Ori Gersht at CRG.(movie exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... To make a film about trees falling in a forest is to risk both the sophomoric and the maudlin. Ori Gersht's The Forest (2005), a 13-minute work shown as a looped, large-screen video projection, is neither. As the camera slowly pans a dense...

Adam Stennett at 31 Grand.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Adam Stennett has a thing about mice. In his first show at 31 Grand, he had them scurrying around the gallery, through PVC pipes attached to the wall. He houses his pet mice in his studio and captures their antics on camera. Stennett explores...

Rebecca Holland at Moti Hasson.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Rebecca Holland is a Santa Fe-based artist who, over the past 15 years, has been showing a wide range of work that includes large-scale installations and sculptures in a diversity of sizes and unconventional mediums. Though her work has...

Serge Onnen at Caren Golden.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Any notion of hand-drawn animation being naive was turned upside down in Serge Onnen's "Glove in Hand," an exhibition of videos, wallpaper, drawings and paintings that addressed rampant consumerism. The Dutch artist, who has published four...

Fernando Canovas at Krampf-Pei.(paintings exhibition)
May 1, 2006... "Painting has one foot in architecture and one foot in dream," wrote the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, a teacher of Fernando Canovas in Paris in the early 1980s. Canovas's recent paintings at Krampf-Pei, a new Chelsea gallery, updated the...

Amy Rathbone at Priska C. Juschka.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... San Francisco-based Amy Rathbone has become known for subtle site-specific installations that interact with various galleries' architecture, as well as for her enigmatic drawings. At times she has created installations that transform an entire...

Elizabeth King at Kent.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Twenty-five years' worth of objects both collected and created by Elizabeth King were assembled in "Studio: Things Found, Things Made," its profusion meant to evoke the hubbub of her warehouse-size workspace in Richmond. But the show's...

Tony Magar at Mike Weiss.(paintings exhibition)
May 1, 2006... The vividly colored, tumbling ellipses that seem to spill through the painterly fields of Tony Magar's recent oils are as esthetically compelling as they are expressive. Their titles allude to such celestial phenomena as constellations,...

Chaim Gross at Forum.(sculpture exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Throughout his long and productive career, Chaim Gross (1904-1991) invested his exuberant sculptures with a keen show of form and content and an understanding of the expressive possibilities of his materials. Gross was introduced to wood...

Maria Elena Gonzalez at Knoedler and The Project.
May 1, 2006... Remembered architectural spaces, distorted by nostalgia, are a primary subject for Maria Elena Gonzalez. In work realized after a 2003 residency in Rome, which reanimated memories of a Catholic girlhood spent in Cuba (she emigrated to the U.S....

Raimund Abraham at Frederieke Taylor.(drawing exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Anyone who knows Raimund Abraham's knifelike tower for the Austrian Cultural Forum on Manhattan's East 52nd Street will have found the silvery model of a massive roughhewn block at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery puzzling. The volume, which has...

Mary Frank at DC Moore.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Mary Frank, an artist ever renewing herself, combines an earthy; hands-on approach to materials with a keen awareness of the potentiality of chaos, accident and chance. Her recent exhibition of 29 figurative works included paintings,...

Zarina at Bose Pacia.(printing exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Born in pre-partition India and now based in New York, Zarina (she goes by one name) here represented her life's journey in the form of a personal cartography. In the early 1960s, she departed from her home in Aligarh to study printmaking in...

Linda Stojak at Stephen Haller.(painting exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Continuing Linda Stojak's expressive depiction of isolated figures of women whose principal affect reads as sorrow, her recent oils and mixed mediums on canvas are as formally compelling as they are moving. (Those described here are dated...

Carolanna Parlato at the Phatory.(NEW YORK)
May 1, 2006... Carolanna Parlato has discussed her enthusiasm for the stained canvases of Morris Louis. Like her predecessor, Parlato tilts and turns paint-laden supports, coercing her runny pigments into amorphous abstractions. Though her technique is not...

Medrie MacPhee at Michael Steinberg.(paintings and drawings exhibition)
May 1, 2006... In a compelling show of recent paintings and drawings, Medrie MacPhee offered work in a mode quite different from that of visionary architecture and industrial decline, which prevailed in earlier efforts. Now, MacPhee's luminous, often...

Michel Francois at Bortolami Dayan.(sculpture exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... The allusive images of Michel Francois's "Theater of Operations" proposed logical relationships within an inventory of diverse elements. On the Saturdays of the exhibition's wintry run, Francois, a poet of multiply-referential imagery as much...

Franco Mondini-Ruiz at Frederieke Taylor.
May 1, 2006... Flashing irony, eyebrows and snappy titles, New York-based Tejano artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz unleashed the participatory Christmas-shopping extravaganza of "Quattrocento," an exhibition of 400 hilarious 8-by-10-inch acrylic-on-canvas paintings...

Agustin Fernandez at Mitchell Algus.(art exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... For the more than three decades he has lived in the U.S., Cuban-born Agustin Fernandez has been creating an original body of Surrealist-derived work while flying under the critical radar. Born in 1928, Fernandez was a university classmate of...

Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason and Cecily Kahn at Hunter College.
May 1, 2006... If an argument were to be made that an art gene selecting for abstraction exists and may pass through successive members of a family, "Three Generations of Abstract Painting" would provide evidence. This carefully organized exhibition offered a...

Dinh Q. Le at the Asia Society and PPOW.(NEW YORK)(Critical essay)
May 1, 2006... In 1979, Dinh Q. Le came to the U.S. from Vietnam with his family at age 11. About 10 years ago, after taking fine arts degrees at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, he returned to Vietnam...

Ken Fandell at Bodybuilder & Sportsman.(videorecordings exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Ken Fandell is either a Romantic Conceptualist or a Conceptual Romantic. His seven-part video series "The Planets" is inspired by Gustav Hoist's prodigious orchestral composition of the same title. However, Fandell is less interested in the...

Bob Emser at Flatfile.(sculpture exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... Bob Emser's sculptures want to fly. When the artist was a boy, pioneer aviators fascinated him and he built model airplanes from balsa wood and tissue paper. Later, in art school, he hit a creative dead end, decided to play like a child and...

Raymond Jonson at Peyton Wright.(painting exhibition)
May 1, 2006... In 1909, Raymond Jonson (1891-1982) became the first pupil to enroll in the new Museum Art School in Portland, Ore. Although he left the following year for Chicago, his initial training under Kate Simmons, a former student of the influential...

Kim MacConnel at Rosamund Felsen.(art echibitions)
May 1, 2006... Kim MacConnel's new series of 28 small pseudo-origami and watercolor collages focus on a seemingly endless number of American foreign policy and military disasters in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe. He crumples, folds and...

Los Super Elegantes at Daniel Hug.(Concert review)
May 1, 2006... It's hard to say whether the latest endeavor of the group known as Los Super Elegantes, a madcap musical called "The Technical Vocabulary of the Interior Decorator," is meant to parody, critique or simply reflect art-world shenanigans. But even...

Kota Ezawa at Cheryl Haines.(photographs exhibition)
May 1, 2006... On Dec. 22, 1895, a German physician named William Conrad Rontgen set his wife's hand on a photographic plate and made the world's first human X-ray. Seared into our collective memory, that image of Frau Rontgen's bare bones, punctuated by a...

Leo Saul Berk at Howard House.(sculpture exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Leo Saul Berk often employs wood to create wall sculptures that suggest real or imaginary landscapes. In previous exhibitions, he traced the natural grain lines of wood veneers, producing a body of work that closely resembled elevation contour...

Brigitte Nahon at Jerome de Noirmont.(sculpture exhibition)
May 1, 2006... In "Ode to Life," her third solo exhibition at Jerome de Noirmont, French-born, New York-based sculptor Brigitte Nahon presented personal if enigmatic allegories on life and the processes of creation. The two large-scale works on view as well...

Catrin Otto at the Berlinische Galerie.(photographs exhibition)
May 1, 2006... Athough Catrin Otto first studied painting, she turned away from that medium over ten years ago. She now works primarily with photographs, which she arranges into room-sized installations. In contrast to her Berlin colleague Thomas Demand, Otto...

Luca Vitone at Magazzino d'Arte Moderna.(paintings exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... The title of Luca Vitone's exhibition "lo, Roma" can be read in three ways. First, as the city declaring itself: I, Rome. And in fact, the unprimed linen works Vitone exhibited are a self-portrait of the Italian capital. Rather than using...

Thomas Dubs at Workspace.(sculpture exhibitions)
May 1, 2006... The Swiss artist Thomas Dubs is best known in Europe for his site-specific, interactive, kinetic sculptures. In a wide-ranging career, Dubs has worked in a variety of materials with enormous openness to their artistic and cultural...

Borga Kanturk and Ahmet Ogut at Platform Garanti.(sculpture and painting exhibition)
May 1, 2006... This show interwove mini-surveys of two young Turkish artists. Both are responding to the current confusion of politics, pop culture and history. Borga Kanturk (born 1978) lives and works in Izmir. His paintings are small and realist, primarily...

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the winners of the new Vilcek Prize in the Arts, given by the New York-based Vilcek Foundation to honor foreign-born Americans who have made exceptional contributions in the arts.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the winners of the new Vilcek Prize in the Arts, given by the New York-based Vilcek Foundation to honor foreign-born Americans who have made exceptional contributions in the arts. The duo receives $50,000.

New Mexico architect Antoine Predock has won the 2006 Gold Medal.(Awards & Grants)
May 1, 2006... New Mexico architect Antoine Predock has won the 2006 Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.

The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego recently presented its 2006 Lou Stoumen Award, worth $40,000, to Gary Schneider. Sally Mann and Eikoh Hosoe.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego recently presented its 2006 Lou Stoumen Award, worth $40,000, to Gary Schneider. Sally Mann and Eikoh Hosoe received the museum's Century Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts has presented its biennial John Cage Award, worth $40,000, to Charles Atlas.(Awards & Grants)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Foundation for Contemporary Arts has presented its biennial John Cage Award, worth $40,000, to Charles Atlas. The foundation has also given 13 annual grants of $20,000 each to individuals in various fields. The visual arts recipients are...

The New York-based Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation has awarded grants of $20,000 each to 30 artists in various fields.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The New York-based Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation has awarded grants of $20,000 each to 30 artists in various fields. They are: Thomas Ashcraft, Slater Bradley, John Eric Byers, Carter, Phillip Chen, Jamal Cyrus, Kenneth Fandell, Susan Giles,...

The Pasadena-based Flintridge Foundation recently gave its biennial awards for 2005-06 to five artists from California and five from Oregon and Washington.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Pasadena-based Flintridge Foundation recently gave its biennial awards for 2005-06 to five artists from California and five from Oregon and Washington. The $25,000 prizes are given to individuals who have maintained a high level of work for...

The L.A.-based No Strings Foundation has presented its inaugural $25,000 grants, given to artists using photography as a medium.(Awards & Grants)
May 1, 2006... The L.A.-based No Strings Foundation has presented its inaugural $25,000 grants, given to artists using photography as a medium, to Ford Gilbreath and Martin Weber.

Amon Carter Museum.(Ron Tyler is director)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Ron Tyler has been named director of the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, effective June 1. From 1969 to 1986, he served in various positions at the museum before becoming a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the...

San Francisco Art Institute.(Hou Hanru is director)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Independent critic and curator Hou Hanru, who is organizing the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, has been appointed director of exhibitions and public programs and chair of the museum and exhibition studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute,...

Contemporary Arts Center.(Toby Kamps is the new senior curator)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Toby Kamps is the new senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. He was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, and prior to that was curator and department head at the MCA in San...

Duke University.(Trevor Schoonmaker is appointed as first curator at Nasher Museum of Art)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Freelance curator Trevor Schoonmaker has been named the first curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C., effective in July.

Smithsonian American Art Museum.(Toby Jurovics is curator)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Toby Jurovics, former curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, is the new photography curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia Museum of Art.(Hyunsoo Woo is curator)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Hyunsoo Woo is the new associate curator of Korean art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was previously interim director of gallery affairs at the Japan Society in New York.

Norton Museum of Art.(Laurie E. Barnes is curator)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., recently named Laurie E. Barnes as its curator of Chinese art. From 1989 to 2005, she headed the department of Asian art at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The New York Public Library recently inaugurated its Bronx Library Center on 310 East Kingsbridge Road.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The New York Public Library recently inaugurated its Bronx Library Center on 310 East Kingsbridge Road. Designed by Dattner Architects, the $50-million, five-story modernist structure encompasses 78,000 square feet for the library's collections...

The principality of Monaco has announced plans to create a National Art Museum, to open in 2010.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The principality of Monaco has announced plans to create a National Art Museum, to open in 2010. According to the Art Newspaper, Prince Albert of Monaco is backing the project initiated by his late father. While a venue and an architect have...

The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., has received a $5-million challenge grant from the Dia Art Foundation.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., has received a $5-million challenge grant from the Dia Art Foundation. Administered by Dia and funded by the Lannan Foundation, the gift will be used to initiate an endowment to ensure the future financial...

Obituaries.(painters)(Obituary)
May 1, 2006... John Wilde, 86, American Surrealist painter who spent most of his life in Wisconsin. Loosely allied with a group of artist friends in the Midwest after World War II, Wilde promoted an idiosyncratic strain of Magic Realism in painting and in...