Art in America articles from September 2003

Art in America archives from September 2003

Egypt demands return of antiquities.(Front Page)(repatriation requested of several foreign institutions )(British Museum encouraged to return Rosetta Stone)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... In mid-July, Egypt contacted several foreign institutions to ask for the return of a number of key Egyptian antiquities. Among them are some of the world's best-known examples of Egyptian art. Echoing the pleas of the Greeks for the...

Terra Museum to close.(Front Page)(Terra Museum of American Art )(board decision to close Chicago facility and place key works on loan)
September 1, 2003... Ongoing turmoil at the Terra Foundation over the future of the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago [see "Front Page," Apr. '01] has led to a decision by its board to place key works on long-term loan to the Art Institute of Chicago and...

Dorothy C. Miller 1904-2003.(Front Page)(Obituary)
September 1, 2003... Dorothy C. Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art for over 30 years before her retirement in 1969, died on July 11 in her New York apartment. Although she organized many exhibitions for the museum, Miller was best known for a remarkable...

Noguchi work dismantled.(Front Page)
September 1, 2003... Shin Banraisha, a room and adjacent garden designed in 1952 by Isamu Noguchi for Keio University in Tokyo, was dismantled early this past summer to facilitate the expansion of the university's law school. The indoor installation, a meditative...

Austria's friendly alien.(Front Page)(ultra high tech Kunsthaus Graz)
September 1, 2003... On Sept. 22, the new Kunsthaus Graz, a large venue for contemporary am, debuts in Graz, Austria's second largest city. The approximately $40-million, 120,000-square-foot, three-level building was paid for in part by federal funds and local...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
September 1, 2003... June '03, p. 29: Jack Macrae's name was misspelled in "Books for Chelsea."

Return to Black Mountain.(Book review)(Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002; 328 pages, $75. Black Mountain College occupies a near-mythic position in the history of American modernism. In 1933, the year it was founded,...

The wild, wild East: the first-ever Guangzhou Triennial and the fourth Shanghai Biennale, in their concurrent runs, caught the energy of the entrepreneurial New China and its art.(Report From China)
September 1, 2003... China today, with its bustling commercial districts and its antic, independent young artists, must be a tough place for the October crowd to visit. For nowhere is there a clearer demonstration of the deep kinship between progressive art and...

Dream machine: Asian philosophies meet Hollywood obsessions in Mariko Mori's high-tech meditation pod, recently on view in New York.(On-Site)
September 1, 2003... Perhaps more than any other contemporary Japanese artist, Mariko Mori captures the contradictions of contemporary Japan. Her works blend riffs on Shinto-Buddhist meditation wit slickly realized cyber fantasy, updating ancient rituals with...

Venice Biennale: "every idea but one": the ur-biennial of contemporary art, currently under way in Italy's Most Serene City, is a gargantuan affair whose sheer bulk obscures the few strong works on view. The menu is huge, but there's not much nourishment.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... So just how big is the 50th Venice Biennale? Although the Italian pleas has tried to quantify this really, really big show, a reliable census is elusive. There are collaboratives and teams to be factored in, individuals appearing in more than...

Mix-master: working in a range of mediums, including video, collage, painting and sculpture, Christian Marclay applies a musician's sensibility to mostly found materials--with startling results.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... Wandering in a Zurich museum some years ago, with dreary weather outside and drearier art inside, I came across a monitor continuously playing a video so humorous and ingenious that it completely changed my mood. It was Christian Marclay's...

Jean Fautrier: rapturous texture: an enigmatic pioneer of art informel, French painter Jean Fautrier created a varied and often contradictory body of work that was the focus of a recent U.S. museum survey.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... Ever since his thickly impastoed canvases were first shown internationally in the mid-1940s, French painter Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) has generated controversy among critics, collectors and curators of postwar abstraction. Many Europeans viewed...

America, real and imagined: the Whitney Museum of American Art reaches outside its normal purview to see how the U.S. is viewed abroad.(The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003)
September 1, 2003... The golden age of globalism, ushered in by the post-Cold War trashing of borders and barriers, already seems a distant memory. Celebrations of cultural hybridity, decentered networks of influence and nomadism have given way to talk of empire,...

Nature according to Knechtel: a traveling survey presents three decades of work by California artist Tom Knechtel, who uses animal, avian and altogether fantastical surrogates to explore the far reaches of human experience.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... Fifteen years on, Jeff Koons's glossy ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) still seems to many an appropriate totem for our celebrity-mad, superficial culture. The kitsch depiction of the pop star and his pet chimp as lounging...

Hilla Rebay: visionary baroness: a recent New York gallery exhibition provided an in-depth look at the paintings, drawings and collages of Hilla Rebay, the tireless, idiosyncratic spirit behind Solomon R. Guggenheim's formation of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which later became the Guggenheim Museum.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... For seven months last year, the exhibition "Brazil, Body & Soul" suffused the Guggenheim Museum in an ecclesiastical aura as polychrome Madonnas and crucifixes climbed the lower tiers of the darkened rotunda and spiraled around a gilded Baroque...

Michael Goldberg at Lennon, Weinberg.
September 1, 2003... Michael Goldberg's nine sinewy abstract paintings and accompanying works on paper on view at Lennon, Weinberg demonstrated persuasively that painting has legs. This exhibition was one of three concurrent gallery shows (the others were at Manny...

Donald Baechler at Cheim & Read.
September 1, 2003... Donald Baechler extends the outer limits of his practice as a painter in five recent patchwork grids of acrylic, paper and fabric collage mounted on paper, linen or canvas, each centrally figured with monumental emblems. Roughly 8 to 10 feet on...

Eric Freeman at Mary Boone.
September 1, 2003... Recasting the 19th-century quest for the sublime, Eric Freeman marshals fields of electric color and optical effects in the service of an abstracted landscape. Of the five vivid, oil-on-linen paintings included in this show of untitled works...

Mel Chin at Frederieke Taylor.
September 1, 2003... There is a kind of political art that is composed of dense combinations of social, historical and literary references. Because such work relies so heavily on the crib sheets helpfully supplied by the artist, experiencing it often resembles the...

Giuseppe Penone at Marian Goodman.
September 1, 2003... Writing in these pages last year, Marcia E. Vetrocq suggested that "Arte Povera has become Italy's very own 800-pound gorilla, an important but nonetheless limited critical construct whose sheer documentary bulk skews our understanding of its...

Josiah McElheny at Brent Sikkema.
September 1, 2003... After Athanasius Kircher's Search for the Geometry of Illusion is the title of one of the best pieces in Josiah McEIheny's recent show (all works 2003). The title, the press release informed us, refers to the researches of a 17th-century Jesuit...

Yoko Ono at P.S. 1.
September 1, 2003... Yoke One at P.S. 1 In Ceiling Painting (YES Painting), 1966, Yoke One intends a participating public to scale a white ladder and, through a magnifying glass, view the tiny affirmation of the title on the ceiling. Through the title instruction...

Claudia Schmacke at Plane Space.
September 1, 2003... Through several attention-grabbing appearances in New York group exhibitions during the past couple of years, German artist Claudia Schmacke has received increasing recognition for her sculptures in which water courses through transparent...

Jose Damasceno at the project.
September 1, 2003... This impressive show was the U.S. solo debut for Rio-based artist Jose Damasceno. Known in Brazil for large-scale sculptures and installations using a variety of unorthodox materials and procedures, the 35-year-old artist was also featured in...

Tom Duncan at Andrew Edlin.
September 1, 2003... Tom Duncan's mixed-medium tableaux enlist sculpted figurines, toy soldiers, scrap metal and a range of useful detritus to tell of the artist's childhood in World War II Scotland and postwar New York. 'The Art of War and Peace" at Andrew Edlin...

Ann Sperry at Kraushaar.
September 1, 2003... There's a story behind sculptor Ann Sperry's "My Piano" series. According to her artist's statement, when she was a young girl, she demanded a piano; her parents bought a spinet piano for her, and her nursery school teacher gave her...

Jean Dupuy at Emily Harvey.
September 1, 2003... This engaging exhibition was art and technology pioneer Jean Dupuy's first New York show in 15 years. Never one to be bound by signature style or medium, Dupuy was associated with experimental movements such as performance, machine art and...

Ellen Brooks at Leslie Tonkonow.
September 1, 2003... Ellen Brooks's exhibition of photographs at Leslie Tonkonow followed a logical progression from her series shown at the same venue in 2000. The earlier images were exterior shots of elaborate forts and tents made of blankets, cardboard and...

France Scully Osterman at Gallery 292.
September 1, 2003... Gallery 292, the "back room" at Howard Greenberg Gallery, is a place where today's inheritors of classic photographic traditions demonstrate the power of the past in the present. That's important at a time when the dominant idiom of...

Lynn Davis at Edwynn Houk.
September 1, 2003... In 1986, Lynn Davis began a photographic cycle of great monuments in the tradition of 19th-century landscape photographers, minus the cumbersome apparatus of the view camera. Her travels first took her to the icebergs of Greenland, where she...

Jim Dow at Janet Borden.
September 1, 2003... Equipped with an 8-by-10 view camera and a patient regard for the history of place, Jim Dew commits his photographic practice to the clear description of the spirit of a perhaps vanishing environment through the language of its architecture. He...

Nell Blaine at Tibor de Nagy.
September 1, 2003... Nell Blaine's paintings of the 1950s are of interest not just in themselves, but for the glimpse they provide of that decade, when modernist abstraction had begun to seem ossified to some, and artists discovered new potential in the sheer...

Daniel Phill at George Billis.
September 1, 2003... The 21 semi-abstractions that made up Daniel Phill's first solo exhibition in New York are based on botanical imagery. In his earlier monotypes and oil paintings, shown in prior exhibitions in San Francisco, where Phill lives, sinuous lines are...

Henry Finkelstein at Kraushaar.
September 1, 2003... A graduate of Cooper Union and the Yale School of Art and a former Fulbright fellow, Henry Finkelstein currently teaches drawing and painting at the National Academy of Design in New York. In the 11 large (48-by-54-inch) oil paintings in his...

Quintana Martelo at Walter Wickiser.
September 1, 2003... The Barcelona- and New York City-based painter Quintana Martelo is known for his careful, evocative still-life paintings of flowers or fruits and other foods, and also paints depictions of newspapers and a nude or two. The technical skill with...

Adele Alsop at Alexandre.
September 1, 2003... Adele Alsop's new Utah-scapes were greeted in the New York media by much burble and gurgle. Words fail us, as Alsop's bipolar stroke and perfervid hues rise, each time, to the picturesque occasion; each canvas is, in short, a love affair with...

Donald Evans at Tiber de Nagy.
September 1, 2003... Examples of Donald Evans's richly imaginative postage stamps and manipulated postcards were on view in Tibor de Nagy's second show devoted to this American artist, who died in 1977 in Amsterdam at the age of 31. Filling a small side gallery,...

Amy Sillman at Brent Sikkema.
September 1, 2003... Given this show's catchy marque title--I Am Curious (Yellow)"--you might wonder how Amy Sillman's latest fantasias relate to the controversial 1967 Swedish film of the same name, one of the celebrated rallying points of the sexual revolution....

Peter Doig at Michael Werner.
September 1, 2003... Raised in Canada and Trinidad, Scottish-born Peter Doig makes pictures that have a slightly seedy air about them, an uneasy preoccupied ambiance that hints at secrets lurking beneath the surface or just beyond the edges Most of the works in...

John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Margarete Roeder.
September 1, 2003... This exhibition of John Cage's celebrated "Ryoanji Drawings" and Merce Cunningham's fanciful and factual delineations of flora and fauna (done over the last 20 years and recently published by Aperture) was simultaneously an installation and...

Jane Irish at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
September 1, 2003... Jane Irish, given the opportunity to show in the Pennsylvania Academy's Morris Gallery, juxtaposed her own paintings and sculptural reliefs with works from the Academy's collection to create a single large installation, which she called History...

Yuriko Yamaguchi at Numark.
September 1, 2003... A couple of years ago, sculptor Yuriko Yamaguchi started working with the imagery of pods and webs. Her webs consist of various shapes of kinky wire; the ambiguous pods are abaca-pulp fabrications of small organic shapes. As you entered Numark...

Marlene Dumas at the Art Institute of Chicago.
September 1, 2003... Although most of the nine paintings in Marlene Dumas's newest series, "Time and Again," are representations of violence and death, they are also symbols of faith--faith in the viewer's ability to assimilate troubling images and faith in the...

Raye Bemis at Fassbender Stevens.
September 1, 2003... Raye Bemis's work speaks directly to the senses. Her installations have little visual impact. There is no narrative, no rhetoric and no message. They resist the imposition of theoretical or political agendas. By design, they cannot be absorbed...

Christian Spruell at Bucheon.
September 1, 2003... In an exhibition of 15 new abstract paintings, Christian Spruell revealed in visual form what is well-known among jazz musicians: that gestures of spontaneous improvisation best announce themselves in a contrasting dialogue with simple,...

Laura Owens at L.A. MOCA.(Museum of Contemporary Art)
September 1, 2003... Questions of sincerity and craft haunt this survey of over 50 works by L.A. painter Laura Owens. A whimsical range of subject matter--including smiling monkeys, doodled circles and a smooching couple--is executed with slapdash bravado and a...

Grant Mudford at Rosamund Felsen.
September 1, 2003... Since he moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the late 1970s, Grant Mudford has composed photographs that crisply examine the streamlined geometries of West Coast architecture and landscape. Mudford has zeroed in on the abstract formal...

Matthew Landkammer at Davidson.
September 1, 2003... The 12 paintings and two prints in Matthew Landkammer's recent exhibition, all from 2002, offer a refreshing retort to those who think that abstract art must be either fully systematic or wholly subjective. While he formerly combined beeswax,...

Richard Wilson at the Wapping Project.
September 1, 2003... For his object-and-action project Butterfly (2003), Richard Wilson purchased a wrecked Cessna 150 light aircraft. After stripping off the paint, polishing the surfaces, and examining the overall shape and structure, he crushed the plane beyond...

"Fugitive Stories" at the Museet for Samtidskunst.(photographic images by Rune Elias Helgeson, Lucie Noel Thune and Morten Andersen)
September 1, 2003... An unusually coherent group show at the National Museum of Contemporary Art offers photographic images by three young Norwegian artists working in book, slide, film and video forms (the exhibition continues through Sept. 28). Rune Elias...

Rob van Koningsbruggen at the Gemeentemuseum.
September 1, 2003... For the last 20 years, Rob van Koningsbruggen has been renowned in Holland as a colorist. His loose, brushy paintings--geometric compositions or very abstracted representations--dominated his recent retrospective with their plethora of hues....

Inta Ruka at Baukunst.
September 1, 2003... Inta Ruka, a Latvian photographer, has been taking black-and-white photographic portraits of her countrymen in the rural region of Balvi, on the Russian border, for more than two decades. She has followed the lives of some families with her...

Vangelis Vlahos at Els Hanappe Underground.
September 1, 2003... Vangelis Vlahos's series of six drawings depicts one of modern Athena's most impressive buildings, the American Embassy. Based on photographs from newspaper archives of the 1960s, the drawings (all 2002) eschew the precision of authentic...

Toko Shinoda at the Hara Museum.
September 1, 2003... Toko Shinoda, Japan's grand dame of abstract painting, turned 90 this year. The Hara Museum celebrated with a show titled "Variations of Vermilion" covering nearly a quarter century of her work, from older lithographs to newer paintings. ...

Gerrit Henry 1951-2003.(Artworld)(Obituary)
September 1, 2003... Gerrit Henry, a frequent contributor to Art in America, died on May 1, of a heart attack. He was 52 years old. One of the most brilliant poets of his generation, Henry was also a prolific and acutely insightful art critic. Thriving on the...

Beijing Biennale set to launch.(Art World)
September 1, 2003... As a flagship addition to recurring multinational exhibitions in Shanghai, Chengdu, Pingyao and Guangzhou, China has now announced the First Beijing International Art Biennale, debuting Sept. 20-Oct. 20, 2003. Under the theme "Originality:...

Boost for the NEA?(Art World)(National Endowment for the Arts)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... On July 17, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to increase President George W. Bush's proposed $117.48-million fiscal year 2004 allocation for the National Endowment for the Arts by $10 million. The additional funds would be directed...

Flap over David's scrubdown.(Artworld)
September 1, 2003... A project to clean Michelangelo's David (1504) has recently sparked an international controversy about methods of restoring marble masterpieces. The primary question is whether to attempt to return the 14-foot-tall sculpture to its original...

Meadows Museum.(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Edmund P. Pillsbury, former director of Ft. Worth's Kimbell Art Museum and Yale University's Center for British Art and former partner in Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art in Dallas, is the new director of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist...

Frick Collection.(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Anne Little Poulet, curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been named director of the Frick Collection in New York. For two decades she was head of the European decorative arts and sculpture department at the MFA. She assumes...

SITE Santa Fe.(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Charles A. Stainback, professor of liberal studies at Skidmore College and director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, has become executive director of SITE Santa Fe. He succeeds Louis Grachos, who now heads the Albright-Knox Art...

International Association of Art Critics (AICA).(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... A.i.A. contributors Eleanor Heartney and Carey Lovelace will serve a two-year term as the new co-presidents of the American chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Independent Curators International (ICI).(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... A.i.A. contributor Susan Hapgood has assumed the post of director of exhibitions for Independent Curators International (ICI).

Cleveland Institute of Art.(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Saul Ostrow, artist, professor and critic, has been appointed chair of painting and dean of fine arts at the Cleveland institute of Art. Most recently he served as associate professor of art and art history at the University of Connecticut,...

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.(People)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Berin Golonu, editor-in-chief of Artweek magazine since 1999, is the new assistant visual-arts curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Winners of the 2003 Praemium Imperiale awards, which recognize lifetime achievement in categories not covered by the Nobel Prize, were recently announced by the Japan Art Association.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Winners of the 2003 Praemium Imperiale awards, which recognize lifetime achievement in categories not covered by the Nobel Prize, were recently announced by the Japan Art Association. Honorees receiving the approximately $125,000 prizes include...

The MacDowell Colony has presented Merce Cunningham with its Edward MacDowell Medal for his achievement in the fields of dance and choreography.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The MacDowell Colony has presented Merce Cunningham with its Edward MacDowell Medal for his achievement in the fields of dance and choreography, and his pioneering collaborations with such artists as John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg...

The Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation has distributed its grants for 2003.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation has distributed its grants for 2003. The awards are given to established painters, sculptors and printmakers. Artists receiving $20,000 each are Joe Barnes, Gerry Bergstein, Kristi Hager, Michael Hall,...

A.i.A. contributor Joseph Masheck is among eight recipients from Russia, France and the U.S.(Awards & Grants)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... A.i.A. contributor Joseph Masheck is among eight recipients from Russia, France and the U.S. of inaugural grants from the recently established, New York-based Malevich Society, which supports projects and research related to the Russian artist....

Obituaries.(Artworld)(Fred Sandback)(Skunder Boghossian)(C.C. Wang)(Marilyn Fischbach)(Obituary)
September 1, 2003... Dorothy Miller, former MOMA curator, died on July 11. Her obituary appears on p. 29. Fred Sandback, 59, Minimalist artist, committed suicide on June 23 in his New York studio. He was known for his subtle, site-specific installations that...