Art in America back issues from September 2007:
What's wrong with art schools.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Sep 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: I found your piece on the state of arts schools [A.i.A., May '07] interesting and relevant, albeit one-sided. As a third-year undergraduate art student at UCLA, however, I am fairly accustomed to one-sidedness. Though Charles Ray, an artist who teaches at my ...
Corrections.(LETTERS)(Correction notice)
Sep 01, 2007 ... June/July '07, pp. 211,212: Our caption and exhibition review misidentifled artist Philip Livingston as Robert. June/July '07, p. 90" In the caption and text devoted to the blueprint drawing Gorky and His Mother, the last name of artist Christine Gedeon was misspelled Gideon. ...
Big mess at MASS MoCA.(FRONT PAGE)(Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Swiss artist Christoph B0chel have been feuding since late last year over the artist's huge installation, which was originally to have opened on Dec. 16, 2006, in the museum's football-field-size Building 5. When the cost of Buchel's project ...
Albright-Knox rakes it in.(FRONT PAGE)(Albright-Knox Art Gallery auctions off contemporary art pieces)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The last of a series of controversial sales of works deaccessioned from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo took place on June 8 at Sotheby's New York, with results far exceeding expectations. At $67 million, garnered for around 200 works from periods outside the modern and ...
Tomorrow's museum directors.(FRONT PAGE)(Center for Curatorial Leadership's training programs)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Early June saw the launch of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), an organization that seeks to train art-museum curators in the financial and managerial skills required of a museum director, with the purpose of encouraging their advancement through the ranks. Co-founded by ...
More exiting museum director.(FRONT PAGE)(Lisa Dennison, Timothy Potts, Jay Gates, John R. Lane, and Jessie Otto Hite)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison has announced that she will resign from the museum to join Sotheby's this month. After 29 years with the Guggenheim, including nearly two years as director, Dennison will be the auction house's vice president of North American operations. ...
John Szarkowski 1925-2007.(FRONT PAGE)(Obituary)
Sep 01, 2007; ... John Szarkowski, the influential director of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department for nearly 30 years and a champion of the medium's potential as art, died July 7 of complications from a stroke he had suffered in February. He was 81 and lived in East Chatham, N.Y. ...
Spring auctions shatter records.(FRONT PAGE)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Will the boom last forever? Many observers of the over-heated auction world predicted a cooling-off period after last fall's feverish art sales [see "Front Page" Jan. '07]. But this past spring's auctions at all three major New York houses provided yet another round of art-market ...
What Kirstein wrought.(The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein)(Book review)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, by Martin Duberman, New York, Knopf, 2007; 736 pages, $37.50. A dynamo of the arts, Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) promulgated his independent thinking and classical taste with exceptional chutzpah. In a massive new life history, The Worlds of ...
It's not made by great men: the traveling exhibition "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" recovers a lost artistic moment in all its diversity and experimentalism.(ANNALS OF PAINTING)
Sep 01, 2007; ... History, runs an old cliche, is written by the victors. This is as true in art history as it is in geopolitics. At any given moment, the walls of major museums, the covers of glossy art magazines and the pages of standard textbooks are filled with works by the most acclaimed artists of the ...
Moses in Gotham: a three-part exhibition last spring reevaluated the contributions of Robert Moses, a visionary long vilified for running roughshod over New York City neighborhoods.(URBAN PLANNING)(Robert Moses and the Modern City)
Sep 01, 2007; ... For more than a generation, few urban planners were more excoriated than Robert Moses (1888-1981), who, as longtime commissioner of the Department of Parks in New York City and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority--among many other titles--was perceived as the de facto ...
Light fantastic: electric light produced uncommon effects in a Virginia show of works by seven international artists.(REPORT FROM RICHMOND)(Artificial Light)
Sep 01, 2007; ... "Artificial Light," the illuminating, illuminated exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University conceived by John B. Ravenal, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was inspired by man-made light and its evolution as a medium. The show indicates that ...
NY galleries.
Sep 01, 2007 ... CHELSEA Aperture Gallery 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel: 212.505.5555 Fax: 212.505.7527 Emaih publicity@aperture.org Web site: www.aperture.org Tues-Sat: 10-6 Sept 7-Nov 1: "Lisette ...
Documenta 12: a dense weave.
Sep 01, 2007; ... This summer in Kassel, at the twice-a-decade art bonanza that is Documenta, the whole undertaking seemed, from certain angles, a last vestige of feudal Europe--a throwback to market day at the town square, where, under the shadow of princely architecture, stalls beckon with fresh goods ...
Ai Weiwei's humane conceptualism: with a bevy of new sculptural projects, as well as a massive living intervention at Documenta, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei brings his brand of cunning, humorous--but ultimately compassionate--provocation to the global scene.
Sep 01, 2007; ... Fairytale, Beijing artist Ai Weiwei's expansive piece at Documenta, began as a simple idea: invite 1,001 Chinese guests to come and stay temporarily in Kassel, Germany. Yet, as in much of Ai's work, what initially appeared to be an appealing, straightforward project soon took on ...
Stingel's eclectic playlist: a traveling survey, which changed substantially at the second of its two stops, reveals that Rudolf Stingel's sociable works actively shape each other's meaning. Viewers are welcome to enter the process.(Cover story)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Piety. Dissipation. Formal invention. Community engagement. Gleeful bad-boy provocation. One by one. the positions Rudolf Stingel has taken plot the coordinates of the field of visual culture, ca. 2007. Conceptually tidy on its oxen, each complicates the others, as is evident in a survey ...
Peter Young: easy rider of abstraction: the journeys, both stylistic and geographic, of a nomadic American painter in the 1960s and '70s are retraced in a survey now on view at P.S.1.(Teter Young: 1963-1977)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Two recent exhibitions of paintings by Peter Young continue to broaden our understanding of how ambitious artists made their way through the multivalent decades of the 1960s and '70s. Paradoxically, in an era when painting had reached its "degree zero" and supposedly nothing more could be ...
The Venice Biennale, all'americana: while the big curated show (heavy on Americans and on painting) is somewhat streamlined this year, new national pavilions are taking root citywide. Add a multitude of ancillary exhibitions, and you have the 52nd edition of this venerable event--the largest yet.
Sep 01, 2007; ... There have been three occasions in the history of the Venice Biennale when the nature of American cultural influence has emerged as a central issue. The first was in 1964, when Robert Rauschenberg took home the Biennale prize for painting, a recognition tantamount to Europe's official ...
A day in the life: with a new color video and a group of large paintings of heads, Sadie Benning moves beyond her reputation as the enfant terrible of Pixelvision, the toy-camera medium she used to wry, diaristic effect in the '90s.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Sadie Benning's most recent video, Play Pause (2006), is a departure for this artist, who came to public attention in the early '90s as a teenager making precocious live-action shorts in her bedroom. Unlike her best-known works, shot with a toy Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, Play Pause is ...
Jane Wilson's book of days: for over 20 years, Wilson has been depicting the changing skies of Long Island, bringing to landscape painting the kind of transcendent luminosity often seen as abstraction's province.
Sep 01, 2007; ... The past 50 years or so have been enriched by the advent and evolution of several art movements that opened up whole areas of practice by means of new materials and ways of seeing. It is thus understandable that during the same time hardly anyone has noticed that we have, in American art ...
Mel Chin at Frederieke Taylor.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Long a student of cross-cultural history, Mel Chin, in his recent work, demands that attention be paid to the survivors of conquest--here natives of the Congo, Sierra Leone and North America. In checklist notes for the pieces in the exhibition, he refers to the works--made of materials ...
Pierre Bismuth at both Mary Boone galleries and Team.(NEW YORK)(Most Wanted Men)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Three shows of work by the Brussels-based French artist Pierre Bismuth revolved around themes of fame, advertising and brand recognition in the art world. No stranger to celebrity himself--he shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)--Bismuth is not ...
Andy Yoder at Winkleman.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Light-conductive lead crystal gives to the newest sculptures of Andy Yoder a translucency appropriate to these playful digs at the less-than-transparent monied classes. The glass elements of the project--fragile portrait busts--were said to be three years in the making. Yoder conceived and ...
Andreas Kocks at Jeannie Freilich.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... This was a show made entirely from paper--paper as sculpture, paper as relief, paper as installation. But never paper as mere drawing surface. In delicate "paperworks," as he calls them, German artist Andreas Kocks repurposes the medium; his imaginative riffs on its properties and ...
Daniel Buren at Bortolami-Dayan.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... This installation of eleven 1966 canvases by Daniel Buren was a revelation, a kind of missing link in the career of the French painter turned conceptualist. Under the influence of Art Informel, Buren had liberally splashed and stained his canvases in the early 1960s, gradually confining ...
Tony Cragg at Marian Goodman.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Tony Cragg showed 14 sculptures in the three rooms of Marian Goodman Gallery. The large works, in bronze, wood, steel or diabase (an igneous rock related to basalt), played on the tension between the natural, organic connotations of their sweeping curves and the evident high-tech ...
Robert Irwin at PaceWildenstein.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... To create a templelike stillness with massive slashes of primary color might seem impossible, yet the dominant feature of Robert Irwin's installation at PaceWildenstein's Chelsea warehouse space (formerly occupied by the Dia Art Foundation) was the spectacular quiet it engendered. Titling ...
May Stevens at Mary Ryan.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... In continuing her exploration of landscape begun over a decade ago, May Stevens here created an environment in which water scenes became sites of memory as well as representations of place. The centerpiece of her exhibition, which included paintings on paper and on large, unstretched ...
Ray Parker at Washburn.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... This exhibition of large abstract oils and smaller ink drawings by Ray Parker, ranging from 1968 through 1975, presented a lesser-known side of this artist's work. By the late 1950s, Parker had arrived at his signature imagery, which consisted of medium-size to large color fields shaped in ...
Jorg Immendorff at Michael Werner.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... It is hard to look at the late Jorg Immendorff's recent work without thinking about his robust 40-year career or the challenge of making the very large paintings while suffering from advanced Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Gone are the lurid lighting effects and ...
Robert Kushner at DC Moore.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... One of a number of dissenters from the austerities of Minimalist and much Post-Minimalist art of the '70s, Robert Kushner played a key role in the Pattern and Decoration movement, exploring the suspect realm of sheer sensuous pleasure while drawing upon a wide variety of cultural sources ....
Adi Nes at Jack Shainman.(New York)(Biblical Stories)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Adi Nes is a photographer drawn to the tableaux of narrative cinema. His exhibition "Biblical Stories" explored tales from the Old Testament redolent of adventure, love and betrayal. The images show an appreciation for young men keyed to the homoerotic (David and Jonathan) and also feature ...
Qiu Zhijie at Chambers.(New York)(24 Seasons)
Sep 01, 2007; ... A savvy melding of ancient and contemporary art forms, Qiu Zhijie's "24 Seasons" series brings together Chinese calligraphy, landscape and photography. The works were created by making calligraphic characters with a "light brush," actually a flashlight, within a night scene. Recorded by a ...
Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... There is always something a little too perfect, deliciously so, about Justine Kurland's high-keyed, large-format C-prints. In her most recent series, "Of Woman Born" (2005-06), tribes of nude young mothers and tots, gamboling in light-dappled glades and less hospitable swamps and canyons, ...
Anna Conway at Guild & Greyshkul.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The subjects of Anna Conway's paintings are generally men reduced to tiny figures by settings that, if not actually hostile, render them absurd. The surroundings suggest metaphors for inner states but do so ambiguously, and the works guard their own inscrutability despite naturalistic ...
Priscilla Roberts at Lois Wagner.(New York)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Priscilla Roberts (1916-2001), an intriguing Magic Realist, seems to have fallen through the cracks of American art history along with the once well-known venue that regularly showed her haunting still lifes, Grand Central Galleries. She was included in Alfred Barr's 1943 MOMA exhibition ...
Nassos Daphnis and Ernest Briggs at Anita Shapolsky.(New York)(Opposing Forces)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The exhibition "Opposing Forces" presented works by two painters with very different artistic temperaments. Ernest Briggs's loose, brushy abstractions take us back mostly to the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, of which the artist (1923-1984) was a leading West Coast proponent--although, ...
Jean Miotte at the Chelsea Art Museum.(NEW YORK)(Jean Miotte: Spirit of Defiance)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Since opening in 2002, the Chelsea Art Museum has hosted numerous enlightening exhibitions. It has also been the home of the Miotte Foundation, which is devoted to archiving and conserving the work of Jean Miotte, a French painter, now 81, who practices a form of gestural abstraction with ...
Joe Fyfe at JG Contemporary.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Eschewing "easel painting decisions" for a collagelike process that allows for great procedural flexibility, Joe Fyfe elicits emotional fine points from deceptively broad gestures. Generally, his paintings fall into two size ranges. They are either a few inches to a foot or two on a side, ...
Wolf Kahn at Ameringer & Yohe.(NEW YORK)(Wolf Kahn: Sizing Up)
Sep 01, 2007; ... "Wolf Kahn: Sizing Up," a two-part exhibition of the artist's recent work (accompanied by a two-volume publication with an essay by critic Karen Wilkin), featured 15 large-scale oil paintings followed by a second show of 21 smaller related pastels. This arrangement evidenced the ...
Ron Ehrlich at Stephen Haller.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Painter Ron Ehrlich dedicated this show of splashy, slashing paintings to the late Stanley Kunitz, a noted visionary poet. Ehrlich's splotches, splatters, sprays, drips and spills enact a visual correlative to the poet's words. A thoroughgoing expressionist, Ehrlich is given to an ecstatic ...
Isidro Blasco at DCKT Contemporary.(NEW YORK)(The Middle of the End)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Photographic representation of space colludes with sculptural reality in the tough, elegant work of Spanish-born New Yorker Isidro Blasco to form a hybrid with an affinity to architectural models. The artist photographs apartment buildings and streetscapes (including tacky commercial ...
Daniel Douke at OK Harris.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Daniel Douke's carefully observed and meticulously rendered paintings replicate the common commercial carton. More than trompe l'oeil, this Pasadena-based artist's deadpan works achieve a level of scuffed verisimilitude exceeding the acrylic-painted wooden product boxes exhibited by Warhol ...
Brent Green at Bellwether.(NEW YORK)(Paulina Hollers, Carlin, Hadacol Christmas )(Movie review)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The animations of self-taught filmmaker Brent Green are marked by morbid topics and quivering imagery paired with discordant indie-rock sound tracks. They've gained attention in the art and film worlds for the good reason that they are easy to like. With an impressive cinematic sense, an ...
J. Morgan Puett at Alexander Gray.(NEW YORK)(J. Morgan Puett / Wholesale/ To the Trade Only)
Sep 01, 2007; ... In Alexander Gray's Chelsea space, enterprising installation artist and fashion designer J. Morgan Puett filled two rooms with various objects, many tidily sealed in fragrant beeswax, from the SoHo clothing store/workshop she operated until 1997. As Puett explains in her folksy Web site, ...
Keith Mayerson at Derek Eller.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Keith Mayerson's paintings have never been big on craft, but he received deserved acclaim in the early '90s for his acerbically funny and delicately rendered small-scale drawings, as in a series called "Pinocchio the Big Fag," which explores a possible gay reading of the cartoon ...
Hannah van Bart at Boesky.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... For her second New York exhibition, midcareer Dutch painter Hannah van Bart showed large, simply drawn figures that seem almost childlike in their innocent, illustrative whimsy. People with animal heads and oversized hands, enormous features and misplaced body parts bring forth a mixture ...
Cameron at Nicole Klagsbrun.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The meticulous art of California visionary Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922-1995) recently received its first New York exhibition. Forty-four works on paper, mainly in ink but also in colored pencil, gouache and casein, stimulatingly sampled an artist who should be far better known ....
Darina Karpov at Pierogi.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... For her first New York solo show, Darina Karpov exhibited 14 works on paper, the majority of them in watercolor, supplemented sporadically by ink and acrylic. Karpov paints a largely abstract tangle of tiny details, with bits of recognizable imagery appearing here and there against ...
Veron Urdarianu at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The Romanian born, Amsterdam-based Veron Urdarianu makes pale oil paintings that portray a world of overwhelming isolation, and also small, lovingly constructed sculptures of buildings. The surfaces of the paintings are thick and seductive. Sometimes Urdarianu discreetly incorporates ...
Peter Saul at David Nolan and Leo Keenig.(NEW YORK)
Sep 01, 2007; ... In this two-gallery exhibition Peter Saul presented a broad selection of recent paintings that are at once grotesque, profane, violent, obscene and offensively funny. They mine the dark side not only of society but of the artist's own demented psyche, which is haunted by an array of ...
David Ording at Bernard Toale.(BOSTON)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The six oil-on-canvas paintings, dating from 2005 through 2007, in David Ording's latest show are skillfully executed quotations of famous works of Western art from the Renaissance through the 19th century. Ording aims at homage to the originals as well as technically assisted attempts at ...
Hannah Cole at Alpha.(BOSTON)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Boston-based painter Hannah Cole's first solo show at Alpha consisted of 20 oils on canvas and panel, ranging in size from 51/2 by 10 1/2 to 37 by 44 inches, all dated 2006. Most of the paintings feature landscapes as viewed through a car window (from both driver and front passenger ...
Aya Takano at Emmanuel Perrotin.(MIAMI)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Called "Wild dogs, hawks, owls, cats, a landfill the size of 44 and a half Tokyo Domes, the stratosphere," Aya Takano's recent solo show was curiously lovely, considering the subject: a garbage dump on the outskirts of Tokyo in a place once called Yume no Shima (The Island of Dreams). The ...
Delilah Montoya at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary.(DALLAS)(Malcriadas)
Sep 01, 2007; ... In Spanish, to call a woman malcriada is an insult suggesting that she has not been well brought up. The term is applied to badly behaved adolescent girls, ill-mannered servants, and in general to women who do not know their place. It is denigrating and belittling, but photographer Delilah ...
Molly Briggs at Zg.(CHICAGO)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Landscape is Molly Briggs's point of departure for explorations of paint, color and composition. Her images of tree silhouettes in empty landscapes recall photography and film as they suggest memory and dream. Briggs starts with a wood panel, which she covers with linen or canvas. She ...
William Lewis at J. Crist.(BOISE)
Sep 01, 2007; ... William Lewis opened his longoverdue exhibition of new art with an impressive display of more than 100 works, most dating from 2006, ranging from wall-spanning oils on canvas to unframed, postcardsize gouaches on paper. The fact that it was his first solo show since completing his graduate ...
Robin Mitchell at Jancar.(LOS ANGELES)
Sep 01, 2007; ... In this group of small gouaches on paper done over the last six years, Robin Mitchell draws from a lexicon of abstracted florals, vines, branches, sunbursts, buds, pods, microscopic life, ganglia and spermatozoa, all afloat on washy grounds of color. Compositions are either centrally ...
Ariel Erestingcol at Togonon.(SAN FRANCISCO)(Please Stand By... )
Sep 01, 2007; ... In his exhibition "Please Stand By ... ," which included two distinct bodies of work, Ariel Erestingcol toyed with the ways that mediated images can sometimes seem more real than reality itself. Borrowing visual and aural elements from massmedia sources, Erestingcol combines them with ...
Matti Braun at Esther Schipper.(BERLIN)(LOTA)
Sep 01, 2007; ... Matti Braun creates and investigates systems of cross-cultural reference. His recent show, "LOTA," his third solo at Esther Schip per, studied traditional patterns and objects from India as well as the mutual stimulation of European and Indian modernism. Two walls in the main ...
Jorge Molder at Fundacion Telefonica.(MADRID)
Sep 01, 2007; ... A harshly lit, impeccably dressed man in a dark suit and tie stands reading a newspaper against an indeterminate black background; a man surrounded by darkness peers down at his brightly lit mirror image; a face is distorted by turbulence as it falls headfirst into shadowy water. The ...
Ernesto Deira at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.(BUENOS AIRES)
Sep 01, 2007; ... The 20th anniversary of Ernesto Deira's death occasioned this major retrospective featuring 122 of the Argentine painter's works from 1960 through '86. Deira (1928-1986), who began his professional life as a lawyer, turned to painting in his mid-20s under the influence of Velazquez and ...
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation recently gave its individual support grants, worth $25,000 each, to 12 mature painters, sculptors and printmakers.(Grants)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation recently gave its individual support grants, worth $25,000 each, to 12 mature painters, sculptors and printmakers. The winners are Jill ...
The New York-based Art Matters foundation has resumed its activities after a 10-year hiatus by initiating a grant-making program.(Grants)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... The New York-based Art Matters foundation has resumed its activities after a 10-year hiatus by initiating a grant-making program. It recently presented $150,000 in amounts ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 to artists whose works foster international collaborations, and will announce two more ...
Olafur Eliasson has won the 2007 Joan Miro Prize, given by the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona and sponsored by the Fundacio Caixa Girona.(Awards)(Brief article)
Sep 01, 2007 ... Olafur Eliasson has won the 2007 Joan Miro Prize, given by the Fundacio Joan ...