Art in America back issues from June 2007:
Disputed O'Keeffe sale in Nashville.(Front Page)(Georgia O'Keeffe painting)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Nashville's Fisk University has been embroiled in a legal battle with Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum over the school's attempt to sell a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, Radiator Building--Night, New York (1927) from its Stieglitz Collection, given by O'Keeffe in 1949 (Alfred Stieglitz died ...
Summer art: the-grand tour.(Front Page)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2007; ... In a once-a-decade astral alignment, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel (which is presented every five years) and Skulptur Projekte Munster (every ten years) will all run this summer, along with the annual Art Basel. The Venice Biennale (June 10-Nov. 27) is being guided ...
Return of The Wall.(Front Page)(Forrest Myers)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Ten years and an eyesore later, a compromise has been reached that will see the return of Forrest Myers's 1972 public artwork, The Wall, but now accompanied by advertising. Prominently located on the side of 599 Broadway, at the bustling intersection with Houston Street, the work has been ...
Alice Neel on film: a family affair.(FRONT PAGE)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Alice Neel, a new documentary film by Andrew Neel, the artist's grandson, tells the story of a dysfunctionnal family whose central figure was often emotionally unstable and wracked by impossibly high ideals. Neel was at one point suicidal and for years a troubled single mom. Yet she was ...
Seattle Museum expands.(Front Page)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The Seattle Art Museum's downtown location reopened on May 5 with a new building designed by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Cloepfil's understated modernist building, which doubles the size of the museum, was designed to seamlessly integrate with SAM's ...
Art cologne transplanted to spring.(Front Page)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2007; ... After 41 years as a fall attraction, Art Cologne, one of Europe's largest and most respected art fairs focused on modern and contemporary works, has moved to the spring [see "Front Page," Oct. '06].The fair's organizers, led by director Gerard A. Goodrow, set the new dates, Apr. 18-22, as ...
Artful follies in the Persian Gulf.(Front Page)
Jun 01, 2007; ... On Mar. 6, just a day before the opening preview of the inaugural Gulf Art Fair in Dubai (Mar. 8-10), a group of art hacks was driven to the neighboring gulf state of Abu Dhabi, where no fewer than five major museums, among them, inevitably, a Guggenheim, are in advanced stages of planning ...
Back to square one: remembering Sol LeWitt (1928-2007).(Front Page)(In memoriam)
Jun 01, 2007; ... After six years of fighting cancer with unexpected success, Sol LeWitt died on April 8th at New York Hospital, age 78. He finished his last drawing less than four days earlier. His death leaves a huge void in the world of art and among his hundreds of friends. I knew him for almost 50 ...
Santa Fe: summer preview.(art)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Over the past 10 years, Santa Fe has witnessed an extraordinary growth across its cultural landscape, the preponderance of which has been in the field of visual arts. Much of this transformation has been the direct result of the founding of such institutions as SITE Santa Fe, the Georgia ...
Women and the Land.(Alice Aycock; Mary Miss; Patricia Johanson)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects, by Robert Hobbs, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2005; 423 pages, $50. Mary Miss, texts by Mary Miss, essays by Daniel M. Abramson, Joseph Giovannini, Eleanor Heartney and Sandro Marpillero, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; ...
Feminism's long March.(books)(After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art)(Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words)(Critical essay)
Jun 01, 2007; ... After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, with a forward by Linda Nochlin, Munich, Prestel, 2007; 320 pages, $39.95. Contemporary British Women Artists in Their Own Words, by Rebecca ...
No regrets: an art critic looks back on the hard-won achievements of feminist art and the current state of its legacy.(Issues & Commentary)(Speech)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The following is the text of the keynote talk that opened the Museum of Modern Art's symposium "The Feminist Future" [Jan. 26-27], revised for a lecture during the "WACK!" show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in April, and slightly revised again for publication. I'd like to ...
Girls, girls, girls: feminist art's phases and philosophies? Let me count the ways ...(Feminist Group Shows)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The wave of solo exhibitions, group shows, surveys and museum projects of gynocentric art that has surged across the country in recent months is not a unified tide. These events are characterized by different levels of scholarship, ambition, scale and resources, not to mention quality. A ...
How Chinese is it? A newly refurbished--and now nominally "Asian"--National Palace Museum recently mounted a landmark Song Dynasty show.(Report from Taipei I)
Jun 01, 2007; ... For more than half a century, since Chiang Kaishek carried off nearly 3,000 crates of choice treasures from Beijing's imperial art holdings, Taiwan has served as custodian of the world's finest collection of Chinese art and antiquities. But in January, Taiwan's government decided to ...
The blurennial: in the fifth Taipei Biennial, 34 international artists and groups presented work under the enigmatic rubric "Dirty Yoga.".(Report from Taipei II)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Here's a refreshing idea. While other cities around the world compete to produce the most comprehensive, satellite-show-larded art extravaganzas imaginable, Taipei has been content, for the last eight years, to offer modest, serf-contained biennials emphasizing curatorial coherence over ...
NY Galleries.(New York)(Directory)(Calendar)
Jun 01, 2007 ... CHELSEA Aperture Gallery 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.505.5555 Fax: 212.505.7527 Email: publicity@aperture.org Web site: www.aperture.org Tuesday-Saturday: 10:00-6:00 Through ...
Feminism unbound: "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" revisits a tumultuous and enormously productive era, presenting a wealth of artwork made by women in the late 1960s and '70s.
Jun 01, 2007; ... One big question raised by the tsunami of exhibitions, symposia and books that have made 2007 a banner year for feminism in the visual arts is, why now? While it is, stunningly, true that the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of State and the front-running Democratic candidate for ...
Worldwide women: curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, "Global Feminisms" explores the range of artworks being made internationally by women born since 1960--and the variety of experiences they reflect.(Cover story)
Jun 01, 2007; ... In a season rife with related events, the Brooklyn Museum's "Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art" is an eagerly anticipated component of a nationwide reevaluation of feminist art. It takes its place alongside the presentation of "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at ...
A painter's progress: a large Hogarth exhibition reveals an artist who often relied on the pictorial strategies of contemporary theater and who was more at ease in engraving than in painting.(William Hogarth)
Jun 01, 2007; ... As you whiz, or crawl, from Central London to Heathrow airport you pass (on a perilous roundabout that dares you to make a diversion) a sign pointing to "Hogarth's House." There in once sleepy, pastoral and affluent Twickenham, a small but elegant villa proclaims that at least one ...
Strangers no more: Rosalyn Drexler has had a varied career as a playwright, novelist and artist. Her paintings from the '60s, the focus of a recent exhibition, reveal an issue-oriented Pop artist who made prescient use of images appropriated from the mass media.
Jun 01, 2007; ... For many, the exhibition "Rosalyn Drexler: I am the Beautiful Stranger--Paintings of the '60s," recently presented at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea, was a revelation. Drexler was a Pop artist with a difference. She shared with her better-known contemporaries--Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann ...
Noits and Skoobs: a recent New York exhibition presented the work of pioneering British artist John Latham, whose Conceptual projects made an indelible mark on postwar art.(Brief biography)
Jun 01, 2007; ... John Latham (1921-2006) died on New Year's Day last year, several months into a survey of his work at Tate Britain. As befits his contentious career, the Tate refused to include his 1991 God Is Great (#2) in the show. The sculpture consists of three books--the Bible, the Koran and the ...
Let us now praise famous men: at once stubbornly physical and highly conceptual, Rachel Harrison's sculptures evoke ancient hero memorials and today's celebrity culture.("If I Did It" at Greene Naftali Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Ferrying me downstairs from Greene Naftali Gallery recently, the elevator man asked whether I liked the Rachel Harrison show there, telling me he just didn't get it. He wasn't alone. I hated to confess a similar feeling of bewilderment--one that abated only slowly, though it later gave way ...
Dan Christensen: fluid line funky beat: an overview of the abstract painter's 40-year career samples his restless exploration of widely varying methods, tools and pictorial possibilities.
Jun 01, 2007; ... A useful cliche, "painters' painter" connotes not only excellence and dedication but also mastery at a level that can be best appreciated by fellow initiates. That the term can be applied with perfect accuracy to Dan Christensen was made clear by a recent mini-retrospective at Spanierman ...
Toon noir: in black-and-white paintings and drawings, Joyce Pensato portrays a cast of cartoon characters rendered with ferocious energy and a peculiar empathy.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Though Joyce Pensato's palette is primarily black and white, she explores emotional and psychological gray areas in her turbulent recasting of big, bouncy cartoon characters and stuffed animals as randy rogues of dubious intent. By turns pathetic and nightmarish, her subjects' rubbery ...
Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater.(Fatty's; art restaurants)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Monet had Giverny; Kim Dingle has Fatty's. Having made a name for herself in the 1990s as a "bad-girl" artist messily showing the dark side of little girls, Dingle took a break from exhibiting to start and run Fatty's, a vegetarian restaurant and wine bar in her studio in L.A. Her work in ...
Carrie Moyer at Canada.(painter)
Jun 01, 2007; ... A feminist revival currently permeating the U.S. art world was well served by the 10 paintings on view (all 2006) in Carrie Moyer's recent show. Populated by fertility-goddess-type figures and forms resembling anthropomorphic pottery with feminine contours, the works are neat and concise ...
Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Dana Schutz cut blob-shaped holes into two of the 14 paintings in her new exhibition, "Stand By Earth Man." The variously sized holes, a handful in each canvas, are dispersed across the nude figures of Male Model and Female Model (all works 2007) and seem fathomless because of the black ...
Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham.
Jun 01, 2007; ... While several of Joan Snyder's recent paintings feature an almost wall-like grid of colors, the majority draw the eye to cores glistening with floral effects set in fields emphatically marked with paint and speckled with other materials. In a few titles, Snyder likens these to ponds, their ...
Valie Export at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Austrian artist Valie Export, a feminist "bad girl" since the 1960s when she cut the crotch out of her jeans and paraded through a pornographic movie theater, has lost none of her punch. This exhibition, only her second solo gallery show in New York, presented a combination of digitally ...
Rebecca Smith at Jeannie Freilich.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Rebecca Smith's eight new works, "The Glaciers" (2006), are part of a group of 12, which in turn is part of her "Blue Cage Sculpture" series, begun in 2002. "The Glaciers" is arguably her most satisfying project to date. Although the gallery is small--or perhaps because it is--each ...
Luisa Rabbia at Massimo Audiello.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Drawing is both a means and an end in Luisa Rabbia's quietly powerful multi-medium works. It is clearly a transformative practice through which she records in real time the sometimes unconscious journey from an idea or observation to its realization in art. Rabbia uses drawing to ...
Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Amy Cutler's gouache drawings of women are richly detailed and eerily elegant. Stoic figures carry out repetitive tasks or collapse in states of exhaustion. Combining art-historical references with a contemporary state of disenchantment, Cutler pushes and pulls us into her deeply imagined ...
"What F Word?" at Cynthia Broan.(Feminism)
Jun 01, 2007; ... According to the press release for this lively group exhibition, the F word of the title might refer to any number of currently contentious topics, including Fascism, Flag and Faith. However, it was clear from the work on view that the primary F word here was Feminism. Appearing ...
"The Feminist Figure" at Forum.
Jun 01, 2007; ... "The Feminist Figure" brought together works by 22 contemporary women artists in an exhibition organized to coincide with the Feminist Art Project, a nationwide endeavor to promote the inclusion of women in culture. The show comprised figurative works executed in a variety of mediums by ...
Sylvia Sleigh at 1-20.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Sylvia Sleigh's sly subversions of old masters have secured her a place in textbooks of feminist art as well as in the current traveling show "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution." Sleigh's paintings from the 1970s-group portraits of female artists akin to the society paintings of ...
Claudette Schreuders at Jack Shainman.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Greeting visitors to "The Fall," a recent show of polychrome wood sculptures and color lithographs by South African artist Claudette Schreuders, was a female figure that set the serene, symbolically resonant tone of the exhibition. Typically somber and, at 35 inches, average in height for ...
Victor Grippo at Alexander & Bonin.
Jun 01, 2007; ... It is incredible that before this relatively small but densely packed exhibition, the work of Victor Grippo (1936-2002) had scarcely ever been shown in the U.S. Grippo, who spent most of his working life in Buenos Aires, was among a handful of artists there, including Leon Ferrari and Luis ...
Portia Munson at P.P.O.W.(Pilkington, Penny and Olsoff, Wendy)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Portia Munson made a name for herself in 1994 with her Pink Project, an astounding display of 2,000 pink things that included hairbrushes, curlers, dolls and every imaginable fluffy feminine tchotchke. Part of the "Bad Girls" exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Pink Project ...
Andrew Sendor at Caren Golden.
Jun 01, 2007; ... A heavy curtain blocking the gallery's front door and smoky gray walls set a somber tone for the oil-on-Plexiglas paintings in "Is There More to Life Than Bread, Blood and Bicycles?," New York-based Andrew Sendor's second solo show at Caren Golden. The cryptic title of the show--not to ...
Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein at Marianne Boesky.(Clara Park, Positions of Contemporary Painting from Leipzig)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and former students of Neo Rauch and Arno Rink, Stephanie Dost and Franziska Holstein first showed in New York at Boesky's 2004 group exhibition called "Clara Park, Positions of Contemporary Painting from Leipzig" (a reference to a gathering ...
Mitch Epstein at Sikkema Jenkins.(American Power)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Mitch Epstein's new series of photographs, "American Power," focuses on the physical evidence of America's relationship with the fuel of modern life. Engaging in what he calls "energy tourism," Epstein seeks out small towns where there are vast power stations, oil rigs, smokestacks and ...
Lynn Davis at the Rubin Museum of Art.(Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis)
Jun 01, 2007; ... This unusual and evocative exhibition, "Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis," on view through July 17, combines eight major works of Buddhist sculpture of the 8th through the 17th centuries, from the museum's extensive holdings of Himalayan art, with a survey of 30 of Lynn Davis's ...
Vera Lutter at Gagosian.(Gagosian Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Vera Lutter's large, stately images are produced through the venerable device of the camera obscura, using a found or constructed room as the camera's box. In several of the works in this show, Venice's seasonal tidal flood appears to spread serenely over the uncharacteristically lifeless ...
William Kentridge at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.(Theater review)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The Magic Flute, Mozart's last opera (1791), has frequently attracted visual artists. Kokoschka, Chagall, Hockney and Maurice Sendak designed stage versions, and Ingmar Bergman turned a performance of it at Stockholm's 18th-century Drottningholm Theater into arguably the greatest film of ...
Naomie Kremer at Hosfelt.
Jun 01, 2007; ... When looking at certain kinds of abstract art, you are often tempted to find something figurative for your eyes to latch on to. Naomie Kremer's frenetic, tactile paintings indulge that urge without crossing the line into overt figuration. Kremer, based in Oakland and Paris, inaugurated ...
Fiona Rae at PaceWildenstein.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Fiona Rae's first one-person New York show in nine years, and her first at PaceWildenstein, dazzled gallerygoers with its visual opulence and its eloquent dialogue between figuration and abstraction. A surprising degree of cohesiveness prevailed in canvases defined by a dizzying mix of ...
Uwe Kowski at Mary Boone.(Mary Boone Gallery )
Jun 01, 2007; ... The Leipzig-based artist Uwe Kowski makes large vigorous paintings that combine a variety of styles while maintaining a singular visceral energy. The six oil paintings that were on view are bracingly full of information: fragments of text, active brushstrokes, beautiful patches of pale ...
Paulina Olowska at Metro Pictures.(Nowa Scena)
Jun 01, 2007; ... In her first New York solo show--"Nowa Scena" (new scene)--Warsaw-based artist Paulina Olowska presented billboard-scale collages steeped in nostalgia but crackling with energy in the here and now. Photographic enlargements and texts (some neatly cut out from their sources, others raggedly ...
Nicola Verlato at Stux.(Stux Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The Italian figurative painter Nicola Verlato is a virtuoso who does not shy away from displaying his skill at drawing and painting. The problem with virtuosi is that they pull it all off with such facility that their work can seem vacuous; we miss the struggle we sense, say, in Cezanne or ...
Lloyd Martin at Stephen Haller.(Stephen Haller Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Lloyd Martin's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery continued on the theme of building. Martin constructs his paintings in layers: stains, drips, bands, bars and perfectly level lines. There is much to see within these carefully composed abstractions. The making of each work is ...
Bill Jensen at Cheim & Read.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Four blackish paintings of recent vintage headlined this show of work by veteran New York painter Bill Jensen, occupying the space opposite the gallery's entrance. Like the other 21 paintings shown, they are oil on linen, vertical and smallish--most under 40 inches tall. These four, ...
Junko Yoda at Zabriskie.(Zabriskie Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The view out of an airplane window while flying high over New York State's Finger Lakes some years ago inspired veteran Japanese-born New York painter Junko Yoda to initiate a series of lush and sinuous abstractions that she continues to refine in the large-scale works (all 2006) featured ...
Laurina Paperina Freight + Volume.
Jun 01, 2007; ... The initial surprise of Laurina Paperina's show was its funky, knocked-off look. Three 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood leaned casually side by side against one wall, loosely painted in lurid pink. On the left a homespun Mickey Mouse rolled supine, spurting blood from his guts, while on the ...
Marta Chilindron and Karin Waisman at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY.(Sculptures in Four Dimensions)
Jun 01, 2007; ... The exhibition "Sculptures in Four Dimensions" contained recent work, much of it inviting viewer participation, by two sculptors born in Argentina but now resident in New York. Marta Chilindron's Blue Cube 48 is made of ultramarine ribbed polycarbonate in 72 4-foot squares that stack into ...
Celeste Roberge at Aucocisco.(Aucocisco Gellery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... A graduate of the Portland (now Maine) School of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a former fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Celeste Roberge made her first major statements in sculpture in the late 1980s. Monumental pieces such as Rising Cairn (1989), a ...
Andrew Junge at Greene Contemporary Warehouse.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Styrofoam Hummer (American Detritus), the ghostly white work of art parked in this warehouse exhibition space, is an obsessively detailed, full-scale replica of the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV, developed in the 1980s by the AM General Corporation and called a ...
Robert Livingston at Perimeter.(Perimeter Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... During 40-plus years as an artist, Robert Livingston has made theater set designs, furniture, abstract sculpture and more. He recently exhibited 11 works in pastel and paint on formed wood panels that employ an economical, deceptively simple artistic language to achieve subtle visual and ...
Andre Ruesch at Phil Space.(A Murder of Crows in Phil Space Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Andre Ruesch is a Swiss-born, Santa Fe-based photographer who has been teaching and exhibiting his work in the Southwest for over 15 years. This show juxtaposed recent works from two seemingly unrelated bodies of his digital photos--a series of semi-surrealistic figurative scenes and a ...
"The Performing Archive" at the 18th Street Art Center.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, vital members of the West Coast feminist performance art movement of the late 1960s-'70s, assembled a small but evocative exhibition of materials archiving their projects and those of their peers. Archives, by their very nature, raise questions of ...
Dave Muller at Blum & Poe.
Jun 01, 2007; ... Both art and rock 'n' roll have tangled lineages and armies of aficionados arguing about what begat what. Combining the two, Dave Muller is an artist and a DJ in possession of some 3,500 vinyl albums, who also plays bass and trumpet in the "anti-rock" band Destroy All Monsters. For his ...
Lauren Davies at Ampersand.(Dominion in Ampersand Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Lauren Davies's recent exhibition, titled "Dominion," consisted of eight three-dimensional works and a pair of large, unframed digital prints on canvas replicating antique French maps of Africa. Petting Zoo/Pongo (2005) and Ivory Products (2006), the two largest works, are homemade display ...
Kate Bright at Emily Tsingou.(Emily Tsingou Gallery)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Kate Bright's land- and seascapes are to nature what My Little Ponies are to ponies, and suggest the fanciful awe a city-bred girl might feel when first encountering nature's majesty. Bright addresses nature at its most emotional essence, yet the surface appearance of her work is less ...
Peter Zimmermann at Emmanuel Perrotin.("Reliance")
Jun 01, 2007; ... In his solo exhibition "Reliance," Peter Zimmermann tackled the tradition of "pure" abstraction. Adopting techniques dear to action and Color Field painters, the German artist bastardized both with astonishing acumen. His lollipop-colored expanses of epoxy resin poured, dripped ...
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at MACBA.(The Killing Machine at the Museum of Contemporary Art)
Jun 01, 2007; ... Gone are the whispery, seductive voices we've come to expect from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Also missing are the poetic, as if overheard, fragments of personal history. Instead, the soundtrack for the artists' new installation The Killing Machine consists of operatic techno ...
Natalie Czech at Jette Rudolph.("Daily Mirror" Galerie Jette Rudolph)
Jun 01, 2007; ... As war and atrocity become commonplaces of our cultural landscape, their documentary images lose impact. Instead of evoking our empathy as evidence of humanity's vulnerability, they rather become a blur, more likely to reinforce Brecht's cynical assertion that "People are too durable, ...