Art in America articles from October 2003

Art in America archives from October 2003

Japanese photos: a lesson.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... To the Editors: Thanks to Lyle Rexer for his article on the exhibition "The History of Japanese Photography" that was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Japan Foundation [A.i.A., July '03]. Both the show and its...

Site-specific in Beacon?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... To the Editors: Nancy Princenthal's article on Dia:Beacon [A.i.A., July '03] was insightful. It considers how an art work relates to its environment. Since many of the works were originally site specific, it could also have been written as...

Giving Moore his due.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... To the Editors: As co-executors of Frank Moore's estate and members of the board of the Gesso Foundation, which Frank created in his will, we were extremely pleased with the sensitive and insightful article "Frank Moore's Ecology of Loss"...

Forever feminist.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2003... To the Editors: After reading the article "Feminism at 40" by Carey Lovelace in the May 2003 issue, I had many unanswered questions. One of the most enduring was: what does it mean to be a woman in today's art world? Lovelace viewed...

Information requested.(Letters)
October 1, 2003... For a 2004 exhibition, the Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (IVAM) seeks films or videos of Scott Burton's 1970-80 performances. Please contact the show's curator, Aria Maria Tortes, via fax 646-613-1091, or e-mail B450646@aol.com.

Corrections.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2003... June '03, p. 43: Contrary to our report, the Tallix art fabricating facility in Beacon, N.Y., does in fact give tours--by appointment at a cost of $15 per one-hour visit. Call (845) 838-1111. June '03, pp. 54-59: Our "Report from Italy"...

California arts hung out to dry.(Front Page)
October 1, 2003... The state of California can't get a break, from the dot-com bust to rolling blackouts, and now a $38-billion budget deficit that may lead to the ouster of Governor Gray Davis in a recall vote on Oct. 7. While agencies and institutions have...

Nasher Sculpture Center opens in Dallas.(Front Page)(Texas)
October 1, 2003... On Oct. 19, the long-awaited Nasher Sculpture Center will open in Dallas on a 2.4-acre site directly across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art. The brainchild of real-estate developer, philanthropist and collector Raymond D. Nasher--whose...

Iraq's lost art: an ongoing investigation.(Front Page)(objects stolen from Iraqi National Museum, Baghdad, Iraq)
October 1, 2003... In the wake of the looting of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad last April, estimates of loss and damage fluctuated, depending on which reports one read [see "Front Page," June '03]. Some journalists claimed that nearly all of the museum's...

Aldrich Museum expands.(Front Page)(Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Conn.,)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., broke ground in September for an expansion and renovation project to be completed next year. The $9-million scheme, designed by the Boston architecture firm Tappe Associates, calls...

Basel's Schaulager debuts.(Front Page)(new museum, Basel, Switzerland)
October 1, 2003... A new venue for contemporary art, the Schaulager, recently opened on the outskirts of Basel, Switzerland. Designed by the Swiss architectural team Herzog & de Meuron, the 215,000-square-foot, multilevel structure functions as a high-tech...

Museum of Southern Art for New Orleans.(Front Page)(Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Louisiana)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... The Ogden Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans debuted Aug. 23 in the city's Warehouse District. The 67,000-square-foot, $11-million complex showcases art from 15 southern states and the District of Columbia. An affiliate of...

Kirk Varnedoe, 1946-2003.(Front Page)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... I met Kirk Varnedoe 30 years ago during my first days of graduate school at Stanford, where he had returned following a post-Ph.D, wanderjahr in Europe to be the sabbatical replacement for Al Elsen, his dissertation adviser and mentor. Among...

John Coplans, 1920-2003.(Front Page)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... When, in 1980, John Coplans went back to being an artist, he said that he couldn't possibly catch up fast enough by returning to his original medium, painting. He was already 60, and there just wasn't time to try out ideas, make mistakes, and...

Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... By Ann Reynolds, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003; 364 pages, $39.95. In 1973, Robert Smithson planned an earthwork for a site near Amarillo, Tex. To reconnoiter the site from the air, he went up in a small plane, which crashed, killing him, the...

Annotated Catalogue Raisonne of the Books by Martin Kippenberger 1977-1997.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... by Uwe Koch, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2003; 335 pages, $55. It's been over six years since Martin Kippenberger died at the age of 44, and his artistic presence seems to just keep getting bigger and bigger. He's already...

City of dreams: the second Valencia Biennial addressed the theme of the "Ideal City," while serving the real-life PR interests of this ambitious, revitalized Spanish metropolis.(Report From Valencia)
October 1, 2003... At a time when international art festivals seem excessive in both number and scope, is there a case to be made that smaller is better? A fine test case was on offer last summer at the second Valencia Biennial, a four-month visual- and...

Learning from comics: in the 40-plus years since Pop art first brought the comic-strip idiom into galleries, three generations of artists have found inspiration in the medium. A current exhibition suggests a few reasons why.(Report From Houston)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... With her first major exhibition, "Splat Boom Pow!: The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art," curator Valerie Cassel has scored a knockout. Originating at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, this wide-ranging, multigenerational show...

Dali's folly: Salvador Dali's critically neglected 1939 World's Fair pavilion, site of an erotic underwater fantasia, recently reemerged in a show of rarely seen documents and photos.(Annals of Surrealism)
October 1, 2003... Salvador Dali spent considerable time in New York in the 1930s, cultivating an audience and a market. These efforts culminated at the 1939 World's Fair in a giant Surrealist folly containing a grotto with erotic all-female tableaux vivants,...

Making it new: despite limited funds and bureaucratic trepidation, Hanoi has a burgeoning art scene that features performance, video and collaborative workshops.(Report From Hanoi)(Vietnam)
October 1, 2003... A billboard on the highway from Noi Bai Airport to Hanoi depicts a smiling woman wearing the wide conical hat that is emblematic of the Southeast Asian field-worker. Emblazoned across the foreground in English are the words "Vietnam,...

Smith-o-rama: juxtaposing the work of the late Tony Smith with that of his daughters Kiki and Seton, "The Smiths" hinted at some shared concerns, however divergently addressed.(Report From Palm Beach)
October 1, 2003... "The Smiths," which appeared last winter at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, was a group show with a twist. It featured Tony Smith (1912-1981) and his daughters Kiki Smith and Seton Smith, each with a very distinct style, working...

Diller + Scofidio: critical structures: a recent Whitney Museum show featured installations, models and projections by this New York architecture team at a significant moment, as they move from art-based cultural critique into their first major commissions for museum buildings.(Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... Since their collaboration began in 1979, the New York wife-and-husband team of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio has blended architecture, stage design and the visual arts into an array of visionary frameworks that escape the traditional...

Franz West's corporeal comedy: long known for his highly refined, mock-clumsy objects and furniture, West has been scaling up his sculpture over the last decade. The result, as seen in a recent gallery show, is would-be public sculpture, consummately forlorn, that monumentalizes the maladroit.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... There are a few great clowns in modern art, and, being clowns, they are usually attracted to crowds. For a variety of reasons public sculpture has seemed to offer them their best platform, which explains why Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg...

Materialist: beginning with some humble utilitarian item--a drinking straw, a loop of tape, a sheet of tar paper--Tara Donovan amasses individual units in such prodigious quantities that, eventually, an esthetic transformation takes place.
October 1, 2003... "What's the matter?" might have been the most relevant question to ask as you walked into Tara Donovan's jaw-dropping, sleight-of-eye show at Ace Gallery this past spring. The 33-year-old artist's New York solo debut, a quantitative and...

Gee's Bend modern: the isolated Alabama community of Gee's Bend has long nurtured a quilting tradition that resonates deeply with aspects of modernist abstraction. Now the quilts are the subject of an exhibition that is touring U.S. museums.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... It is a given that most museum shows of recent art serve to ratify accepted tastes and standards. A Johns or Flavin retrospective, or a survey of Fluxus art, while certainly deepening our knowledge of the subject, is not about to change...

Carlo Maria Mariani's eternal cities: in a recent series of U.S. exhibitions, Mariani, a veteran of Rome's avant-garde, pays tribute to New York City, his adopted home. With their Neo-Classical appearance, his idealized figures are unexpected denizens of the contemporary urban environment.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
October 1, 2003... In his refined images featuring idealized, Neo-Classical figures, painter Carlo Maria Mariani evokes the rarefied atmosphere of antiquity and the lush perfection of Arcadia. Yet the artist has little interest in replicating the past and even...

Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent.(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison's first solo show in New York in 10 years, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, opened with a circular map of the earth, installed on a wall facing the entrance. Measuring 86 inches in diameter, the Harrisons' global map...

Beyond easy pleasures: the exuberant color and lyrical draftsmanship for which painter Wolf Kahn is best known may, the author suggests, conceal a deeper contemplation.
October 1, 2003... Lyrical scenes of woods, pastures, lakes, streams, coastal sites and, perhaps most famously, barns, whose looming geometry figures in so many compositions: these are the basis of Wolf Kahn's popularity among the broad public. Kahn's landscapes...

Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong.(New York)(exhibition of sculpture by the artist)
October 1, 2003... Using a deceptively limited vocabulary--chiseled cedar, a few traces of graphite--Ursula von Rydingsvard engages line, surface, mass and even motion, all at considerable scale, and all with well-practiced grace. Hej-duk is a broad stairway of...

Joel Shapiro at Pace Wildenstein.(New York)(exhibition of abstract sculptures)
October 1, 2003... The five large, untitled abstract sculptures Joel Shapiro showed at Pace Wildenstein energized the surrounding space in a way that was striking, even for this artist. Shapiro has spent many years examining the severely geometricized...

Jorge Oteiza at Haim Chanin.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... When Basque modernist Jorge Oteiza announced his retirement from sculpture in 1959 at the age of 51, he declared that he had taken the manipulation of space as far as it could go. In the decades that followed he completed existing commission&...

Rosangela Renno at Lombard-Freid.(New York)(exhibition of artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Rosangela Renno, who along with Beatriz Milhazes represented Brazil in this year's Venice Biennale, is known for works that recast and transform appropriated photographic images. In the past, she has presented anonymous portraits compiled from...

Elyn Zimmerman at Gagosian.(New York ... the photographic work of a noted sculptor is featured at a new exhibit)
October 1, 2003... A thoughtful excursion into photography, sculptor Elyn Zimmerman's grid-based composites are closely related in format to the two, nine-part grids of abstracted ink drawings that were central to her last exhibition at Gagosian, in 2001. These...

Omer Fast at Postmasters.(New York ... a video art exhibit explores misrepresentation in documentary film)
October 1, 2003... For his first New York solo show, Israeli-born Omer Fast, now based in Berlin, presented a pair of documentary-style videos. At first these morally complex works seem to take issue with their top-layer subjects: in one, the Israeli military and...

Emily Jacir at Debs & Co.(New York ... a photographic exhibit documents Palestinian life under occupation)
October 1, 2003... Putting a human face on the Palestinian side of the Middle East conflict, Emily Jacir presents the results of a remarkable yearlong project titled "Where We Come From." Jacir, an artist of Palestinian ancestry, took advantage of her American...

Conrad Atkinson at White Box.(New York ... the artist's work treats wound images as brand marks)
October 1, 2003... A catalogue of bloody wounds constituted the newest phase of this mini-retrospective of Conrad Atkinson's subtle, elusive, politically engaged art. Extracted from the Metropolitan Museum's and Courtauld Institute's medieval and Renaissance...

Paul Sietsema at the Whitney.(New York ... Empire is the showpiece of a new exhibit)
October 1, 2003... The young Los Angeles-based artist Paul Sietsema's two-part museum debut began in the Whitney lobby gallery with his newest film, Empire (16mm, 2002). Described in press material as "an exploration of physical, psychological, and cinematic...

The Royal Art Lodge at the Drawing Center.(New York)(Winnipeg artists Marcel Dzama, Holly Dzama, Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier, Drue and Myles Langlois, Adrian Williams and Jon Pylypchuk)
October 1, 2003... Despite the annoying persistence of the myth of the isolated genius, contemporary art-making has become far more collaborative. Whether working with fabricators or shepherding a project through institutional bureaucracy, artists have grown...

Jon Pylypchuk at Friedrich Petzel.(New York)
October 1, 2003... Canadian-born Jon Pylypchuk is a former member of the Royal Art Lodge, the Winnipeg-based collective that was the subject of a recent show at the Drawing Center. His latest solo exhibition, titled "and now, occasionally, and reluctantly, I lift...

Matthew Benedict at Alexander and Bonin.(New York)
October 1, 2003... Skillfully if summarily painted in the manner of high-quality adventure-book illustrations, Matthew Benedict's recent work adroitly extends his turf in the crowded field of neo-Conceptual figuration. This exhibition, called "Crossing the Line,"...

Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons and JG/Contemporary.(New York)
October 1, 2003... Duncan Hannah's atmospheric realism recalls that of Edward Hopper by way of 1930s and '40s illustrations, with a touch of Masterpiece Theatre. His well-executed, modest to moderately scaled oil paintings are suffused with boyish charm and...

Arnold Mesches at P.S. 1.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work uses deals with investigation of him conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1945-1972)(Critical Essay)(Biography)
October 1, 2003... Arnold Mesches had his first one-person show in 1946. The hundredth or so was in New York City (at P.S. 1) in 2002--the series of 48 masterful paintings, "Anomie, 1492-2001," that encapsulate American history [see A.i.A., Feb. '02]. Now he is...

Dawn Mellor at Team.(New York ... an exhibition of surrealist art lampoons media fascination with celebrity)
October 1, 2003... With a comic bitchiness that would shame Joan Rivers, British artist Dawn Mellor skewers female celebrities in the 14 drawings and six oil paintings that constituted her first New York solo show. Jennifer Lopez and her ilk are meted a full dose...

Kathe Burkhart at Mitchell Algus, Participant Inc. and Schroeder Romero.(New York)
October 1, 2003... If for no other reason than that she introduced the term "Bad Girl" into art discourse--in a 1990 interview in Flash Art, some four years before New York's New Museum adopted the term for its landmark exhibition of the same name--Kathe Burkhart...

Cui Fei at Gallery 456.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Cui Fei received her undergraduate degree from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in her native China and a master's from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her exhibition, titled "The Voice of the Voiceless," was an assembly of vine tendrils,...

Roman Opalka at Grant Selwyn.(New York ... numerology figures prominently in the painter's work )
October 1, 2003... Since 1965, Roman Opalka has been painting the same thing, number sequences. You know what you'll see when you go to his exhibitions, yet every painting is distinctive. The explanation is in the details, and Detail (plus a range of numbers) is,...

Knox Martin at Janos Gat.(New York ... drawings in the exhibit "Caprichos" are reminiscent of Goya's treatment of nightmare)
October 1, 2003... Knox Martin named his new series of generously scaled, unframed drawings "Caprichos" for the moralizing, didactic, fever-dream etchings of Goya that first attracted him as a child, 67 years ago. But there is substantial whimsy to Martin's...

Michael Madore at Phyllis Kind.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Michael Madore's debut show at Phyllis Kind presented 26 paintings and drawings from the 1980s, and 44 small paintings on paper from the past two years. The early works feature funky narratives involving satellites, radios and Pop-culture...

May Stevens at Mary Ryan.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... May Stevens regards the cursive, richly allusive and nearly unreadable texts she incorporates into her paintings as waves of words or extensions of her palette. Her horizontally oriented acrylic landscape paintings are as much as 10 feet...

Judith Murray at Sundaram Tagore.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Judith Murray's recent abstract works (oil on canvas, 1999 to 2003) speak of the pleasure of painting. She is deeply interested in mark-making. Her light, feathery brushstrokes are reminiscent of the ones used by Braque and Picasso to fill the...

Tony Berlant at Lennon, Weinberg.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... In the early 1960s, Tony Berlant came across a pile of metal advertising signs that, as he was looking for materials to work with, he cut up and nailed to boards. He thereby found his own idiosyncratic method of pictorial composition, which he...

Michael Craig-Martin at Gagosian.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Michael Craig-Martin responded to the formidable challenge of filling Gagosian's vast Chelsea space with the painting installation, "The Eye of the Storm." The front gallery featured a brightly painted mural and one large canvas, and the back...

Jill Levine at P.P.O.W.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... In Jill Levine's work there is a symbiotic relationship between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration. For some years now, she has been meticulously painting popular images of Hindu deities over medium-sized, biomorphic,...

Jim Dingilian at McKenzie.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... For his first New York solo exhibition, Jim Dingilian purchased thrift shop silver-plated dishes and trays, polished them and coated them with candle smoke. He then conjured meticulous tableaux of nostalgic interiors and populated landscapes by...

Luisa Rabbia at Massimo Audiello.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Italian artist Luisa Rabbia began exploring the intimate world of sleep in a 1999 performance in Milan; she rested on a bed during the opening reception of the exhibition, naked but for a thin sheet covering her body. The performance contrasted...

Robert Wogan at Universal Concepts Unlimited.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... Robert Wogan's recent installation, Below (United Radiance), evoked the labyrinthine interior of the SS United States, designed by William Francis Gibbs and launched in 1952; it remains the longest passenger vessel ever built in the U.S. On her...

Carter Hodgkin at Cheryl Pelavin.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... This exhibition of 24 recent works by Virginia-born New York painter Carter Hodgkin featured large and medium-size oil-on-canvas pieces as well as smaller works on paper, including a number of monotypes. In her work of the past 20 years,...

Carl Plansky at Fischbach.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's works)
October 1, 2003... Carl Plansky has an enviable facility with oil paint. A single work may be thickly encrusted in places and bare in others, with both running drips and transparent washes. At first sight, his canvases resemble palettes and drop cloths rather...

Salvatore Federico at Amos Eno.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... In the seven new abstract paintings that comprised his recent show, Salvatore Federico continues to work with two-color, hard-edge compositions that fall within the tradition of late Matisse, Ellsworth Kelly and Tony Smith, Federico's teacher....

Suzan Dionne at ROME Arts.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)
October 1, 2003... A halo is a circle of sacredness, a light-emanating form that signals a holy presence. The empty halos that are the subjects of Suzan Dionne's oil paintings are black, however, and each work breaks with the symbolic canon in a different way....

Gabriela Machado at Neuhoff.(New York)(exhibition of the artist's work)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Gabriela Machado is a Brazilian artist whose flowing, gestural brushstrokes--crimson energies on white fields--command considerable poise and presence. She clearly subscribes to the Abstract-Expressionist credo, in which the play of paint is...

Margaret Neill at Metaphor.(New York)
October 1, 2003... Having explored the possibilities of looping, gestural mark-making in her earlier work, Margaret Neill now examines line by focusing on the edges of forms. In so doing, she comes to grips with color in a big way. Her beautiful and ingenious new...

Ingo Meller and Otto Zitko at Cheim and Read.(New York ... the work of abstract painters is exhibited )
October 1, 2003... Ingo Meller studied in Germany with Eduardo Paolozzi and Daniel Spoerri. His art education was centered on sculpture and the legacy of Marcel Duchamp. After graduating in the early 1980s, he received a grant from the German government and used...

Stephen Estock at Schmidt-Dean.(Philadelphia)
October 1, 2003... Throughout his career Stephen Estock has constantly refined his love of visual sensation created by the painted interactions of line, color, space and light. Among other artists in Philadelphia, Estock has the distinction of being one of the...

Thomas Chimes at Locks.(Philadelphia)
October 1, 2003... "Faustroll Landscape," presenting portraits and landscapes from the 1980s by Thomas Chimes, was the third exhibition at the Locks Gallery documenting this artist's work from successive decades. Fourteen oil paintings on canvas--five portraits...

Todd McKie at Victoria Munroe.(Boston)
October 1, 2003... A hundred years ago this year, when Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her palazzo-style home to the public as a museum, she stashed her collection of centuries-old European lace in an especially dim, frequently roped-off corner of the Veronese...

Maggie Michael at G Fine Art.(Washington, D.C.)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... With certain utterly simple works, as with Maggie Michael's "Clones" series in this show at G Fine Art, there is palpable and unexpected organic warmth. Each work consists of two thick pours of house paint on Plexiglas. Next to each other on...

Evan Levy at Sandler Hudson.(Atlanta)
October 1, 2003... On a recent visit to the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd's sculpture compound in Marfa, Tex., Atlanta sculptor Evan Levy noticed that a corner was missing from one of the 15 nine-foot-tall concrete boxes in a 3/5-mile-long outdoor art work....

Joelle Tuerlinckx at the Renaissance Society.(Chicago)
October 1, 2003... Belgian artist Joelle Tuerlinckx's Chicago Studies: Les Etants Donnes--Space Thesis was a meditation on the nature of objecthood. Part installation, part performance, part archive, the work offered a Duchampian exercise whereby the process and...

Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick at I Space.(Chicago)
October 1, 2003... Gillian Brown and Inga McCaslin Frick have shown together in the past, and they paired up again for this two-person exhibition of video installations at the University of Illinois's I Space. In separately conceived works, both artists explore...

Kit Keith at William Shearburn.(St. Louis)
October 1, 2003... Kit Keith, a longtime St. Louis resident now based in Brooklyn, is a denizen of thrift shops, where she locates such early 1950s treasures as linoleum samples, flowered wallpaper and aging account ledgers. Each of the 29 paintings, drawings and...

Colin Chillag and Mark Takamichi Miller at Studio LoDo.(Phoenix)
October 1, 2003... Colin Chillag drives big trucks through the American west for a living, so it's not surprising that many of his recent works are landscapes. In paintings with titles such as Long Beach, San Francisco and Monument Valley, he builds thick globs...

Ruth Asawa at Tobey C. Moss.(Los Angeles)
October 1, 2003... The 31 works by Bay Area artist Ruth Asawa in this show date from 1959 to 2001. The Japanese-American artist, best known for her wire sculptures, began her art training as a teenager interned with her family in the World War II camps. She went...

R.B. Kitaj at L.A. Louver.(Venice, Cal.)
October 1, 2003... R.B. Kitaj's "Los Angeles Pictures," made since the artist returned to L.A. from London in 1997, are full of brooding, philosophical kneading, syrupy longing, informed commentary and amusing jokes. They're akin, that is, to the work he's been...

Salomon Huerta at Patricia Faure.(Santa Monica)
October 1, 2003... When you entered the first room of Los Angeles artist Salomon Huerta's exhibition of nine new paintings at the Patricia Faure Gallery, you were in a flat, sherbet-colored, symmetrical world of nearly identical single-story pink or lavender...

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam at Gallery 16.(San Francisco)
October 1, 2003... Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam are both consummate multitaskers of the kind that are ascendant in today's art world. In addition to teaching full time and maintaining independent studio practices, each regularly contributes to art magazines...

Hildur Bjarnadottir at Pulliam Deffenbaugh.(Portland, Ore.)
October 1, 2003... Internationally admired for her excellent skills in weaving, needlework and crochet, Hildur Bjarnadottir invests traditional forms such as doilies and table coverings with humor and surprise. With this exhibition of new work, "Stretching...

Neal Tait at White Cube.(London)
October 1, 2003... In this recent exhibition titled "The Burnished Ramp," Neal Tait's second solo show at White Cube, the painter once again presented a number of enigmatic portraits. However, he has shifted the emphasis of his work to include diverse subjects...

Hanspeter Hofmann at Kunsthaus Glarus.(Glarus, Switzerland)
October 1, 2003... This exhibition was an impressive presentation of six huge acrylic paintings by Hanspeter Hofmann that hover between abstraction and representation. They are the largest works the Swiss artist has created. The main display hall featured four...

Friederike Feldmann at Galerie Barbara Weiss.(Berlin)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Friederike Feldmann's approach to painting appears both scientifically methodical and perfectly decorative: she decides on a theme and paints versions of it before moving on to another, which is worked through in the same exploratory manner....

Art schools.(Directory)(Directory)
October 1, 2003... NEW ENGLAND The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University Office of Admissions 700 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02215 617.585.6700 Fax: 617.437.1226 Toll-free 800.773.0494 Web: www.aiboston.edu Professional college of...

Art services.(Directory)(Directory)
October 1, 2003... ADVERTISING DESIGN PRINTING Dynacolor Graphics Inc. P.O. Box 699037 Miami, FL 33269-9037 800.624.8840 ext. 322 Web: www.dynacolor.com Dynacolor Graphics is one of the fine art industry's leading printers of full color...

Obituaries.(Artworld)(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... Enrico Baj, 78, Italian artist, died June 16 of cancer at his home in the northern town of Vergiate. From the time of his emergence in the early 1950s until the end of his life, Baj was a font of paintings, sculptures, collages, artist books,...

Whitney names new director.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Adam D. Weinberg, director since 1999 of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is the new head of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He succeeds Maxwell Anderson, who stepped down in May [see...