Art in America back issues from October 2007:
Giving Aboriginal art its due.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Oct 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: It was with great interest that I received your April issue and found Richard Kalina's excellent article about Australian Aboriginal art. I remember well his "Report from Australia" in April 2005, and have been looking forward to his analysis of the Aboriginal ...
In defense of double-duty critics.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Oct 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: I write about art and architecture for the Rocky Mountain News, a daily newspaper in Denver. This is a belated thank you for Peter Plagens's thoughtful appraisal of the current condition of art criticism in general interest newspapers and magazines [A.i.A., Feb. ...
Placing Barela.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Oct 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: It was refreshing to read Sarah S. King's article on Patrocino Barela in the April issue of Art in America. Her accurate characterization of Barela's sculptures as a "brilliant anomaly" is a reminder that this self-taught artist has for many years defied ...
More drawers.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Oct 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: Having read the "Artworld" article "Floodwall's Originality Challenged" [A.LA., Mar. '07], I found the debate about ownership of an idea very interesting, particularly because in 1995--two years before Sook Jin Jo and nine years before Jana ...
New Orleans ghost house.(FRONT PAGE)(Lower Ninth Ward )(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... How to raise awareness of Hurricane Katrina's lasting physical and emotional toll on New Orleans, almost two years after the fact? New York-based Japanese artist Takashi Horisaki's answer: "re-erect" a damaged Lower Ninth Ward shotgun-style house by displaying a thin, tentlike, highly ...
At last, Athens's New Acropolis Museum.(FRONT PAGE)
Oct 01, 2007; ... The long delayed New Acropolis Museum in Athens, some 30 years in the making, is set to open next year in its Bernard Tschumi-designed building. Construction has been completed on the $175-million, 226,000-square-foot structure in the Makryianni neighborhood in the shadow of the Acropolis, ...
Arts boost in NYC schools.(FRONT PAGE)(art education in New York City public schools)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... In late July, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan to enhance arts education for the 1.1 million students in New York City's public schools. Instead of increasing the city's budget for arts education, administrators have implemented a new system of accountability dubbed ArtsCount ....
China's new attitude.(FRONT PAGE)(Sichuan Province's cultural policy)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007 ... Just how radically times have changed in the Chinese art world was evident in a cultural-tourism announcement made recently in Sichuan Province. Dujiangyan, a metropolitan county of 622,000 residents, has pledged to invest $13 million to erect eight museums, each to be run by a well-known ...
Restored WPA mural in L.A.(FRONT PAGE)(Work Projects Administration, Los Angeles )(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Commissioned in 1939 by the Work Projects Administration to create a mural for Los Angeles's Inglewood district, Pasadena-based artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) produced an expansive and ambitious composition, The History of Transportation. Stretching 240 feet, the 7 1/2-foot-high, ...
The Clark @ MASS MoCA.(FRONT PAGE)(The Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts Museum Of Contemporary Art)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007 ... The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., has entered into a long-term lease agreement with MASS MoCA in nearby North Adams. For an undisclosed amount reported to be in the seven figures, the Clark will lease 29,000 square feet of exhibition and storage space in three buildings on ...
Art:21 on the air.(FRONT PAGE)(Television program review)
Oct 01, 2007; ... The fourth season of the engaging PBS series "Art:21," which airs biennially, will begin broadcasting new episodes in late October. Created by curator Susan Sollins, the show spends time with artists in their studios and at various sites, often as they prepare work for upcoming ...
Elizabeth Murray 1940-2007.(FRONT PAGE)
Oct 01, 2007; ... It was widely known that Elizabeth Murray was gravely ill with complications from lung cancer, but her death at her upstate New York home on Aug. 12 at the age of 66 still came as a blow. Until treatment left her frail, Murray seemed younger than her age. Thin, with luminous blue eyes, a ...
A trade in black and white: the author recalls a time when New York School artists were willing to swap paintings for cars--even if they didn't drive.(SHORT SUBJECTS)
Oct 01, 2007; ... During the early '60s, my late husband, Harold Diamond, a private dealer in New York, was doing a lot of business with Willem de Kooning. In 1964, the painter moved to his new studio in the village of Springs, near Easthampton, joining Jackson Pollock and other artists living there. Harold ...
Megacollecting, Family-Style.(Mellon: An American Life; The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud)(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Mellon: An American Life, by David Cannadine, New York, Knopf, 2006; 778 pages, $35. The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud, by Nicholas Fox Weber, New York, Knopf, 2007; 420 pages, $35. ...
A magnet for the with-it kids: for a brief time in the 1960s, an unlikely mix of personalities and circumstances made New York's Jewish Museum the city's leading showcase for avant-garde art.(MUSEUMS)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For almost the entire decade of the 1960s, New York's Jewish Museum was consistently grouped with the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art as one of the premier institutions in New York at which to ...
Alive and well: the Centre Pompidou today: with a satellite outpost due to open in Metz, plans to annex two vacant floors at the Palais de Tokyo and consistently inventive programming, the Pompidou turns 30 with grace.(REPORT FROM PARIS)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Thirty years ago, Paris's Centre Pompidou was the new kid on the block. These days, it's flexing its muscles with confidence. Like architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano--Young Turks in the early '70s, when they designed this iconic building, and now both Pritzker Prize winners--this ...
After "unofficial": at the second Moscow Biennale, a far-flung assortment of supplementary shows stirred the greatest viewer interest.(REPORT FROM MOSCOW)
Oct 01, 2007; ... The Russian winter, famous for its severity (weather is generally seen as the deciding factor in the defeats of Napoleon and Hitler by the Russian army), might not seem the ideal time for a multivenue international biennial designed to send visitors to all corners of Moscow. Nevertheless, ...
Found objects to sound objects: eleven Pacific Northwest venues presented a selection of inventive sound-generating installations by the Seattle-based artist Trimpin.(REPORT FROM SEATTLE)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A technological revolution has provided artists with digital tools that erase not only the need but sometimes the desire for a source grounded in the physical world. Yet the Seattle-based artist who goes by the single name Trimpin has returned repeatedly ...
Outside the system: despite continuing problems with officialdom, the ongoing Saigon Open City exhibition series reveals the vitality of Vietnam's contemporary art scene.(REPORT FROM HO CHI MINH CITY)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Ho Chi Minh City, the largest city in Vietnam--which many locals still call by its former name, Saigon, especially when referring to the downtown district--has an economy that is expanding faster (10 to 12 percent annually) than markets in any other part of the country. Money is made here, ...
The expanded field: Munster's latest decade: the fourth installment of sculpture Projects Munster, a series of exhibitions held every 10 years, was a freewheeling affair in which finding the works was as diverting as looking at them.
Oct 01, 2007; ... It was a fascinating, and for me entirely refreshing, experience to move from Documenta 12 in Kassel to the Sculpture Projects Munster exhibition three or so hours away by train. These dual events in Germany constituted two of the stops on a so-called "Grand Tour" (with the others being ...
The long shadows of slavery: since the mid-1990s, Kara Walker has been crafting willfully transgressive cut-paper murals of life in the antebellum South. A traveling survey that arrives at the Whitney this month examines the full range of Walker's art.(Whitney Museum)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Despite the outcry last spring over radio shock jock Don Imus's on-air denigration of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, the incident was a reminder, if one were needed, that racist cliches still have a lot of mainstream currency. While his ...
Into the woods.(Neil Welliver's works)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Shortly after Neil Welliver died in 2005, New York's Alexandre Gallery, which represents his work, held a memorial exhibition of his landscape paintings, but the show didn't really amount to a full-fledged retrospective. Last fall, however, the gallery and ...
Martin Ramirez: narratives of displacement and memory the term Outsider, often applied to Ramirez, poorly serves an artist whose work meets the highest standards of mainstream modernism on both formal and expressive grounds.
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Martin Ramirez's marvelously expressive and formally inventive drawings of horseback riders, animals, landscapes, trains and tunnels, as well as the Madonna and other religious subjects, have been known to the art public since the 1970s. That was when ...
Good-life Ada: a recent exhibition generously sampled Alex Katz's many portraits of his wife, Ada, providing a synopsis of the artist's career and a microcosm of an era.
Oct 01, 2007; ... An exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum of Mex Katz's portraits of his wife, Ada Katz, offered unique testimony in the annals of postwar modernism to the healthy persistence of that seemingly moribund chestnut: a muse. The show spanned almost five decades, 1957 to 2005--nearly the same ...
Facing the nation: Harold Stevenson's "The Great Society," a monumental suite of portraits depicting residents of the artist's hometown, Idabel, Okla., was recently exhibited after languishing in storage for 40 years.
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Surprisingly, the genre of American Scene painting--so often associated with cornball Americana and homespun myths--was named after an urbane, sophisticated source, Henry James's collection of essays, The American Scene (1907), about a trip from Boston to ...
"Philosophy of Time Travel" at the Studio Museum.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Entering the recent exhibition "The Philosophy of Time Travel" was like stumbling upon a demolition site or the aftermath of an earthquake. A massive column had apparently burst through the ceiling and crashed heavily to the floor, smashing floorboards and ...
Tetsuya Yamada at Francis M. Naumann.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Duchamp and Brancusi, one a rational anti-esthete, the other a visionary devoted to the spiritual dimensions of his craft, are submitted to an unlikely pairing in Tetsuya Yamada's new work. The 45 ceramic sculptures in this show are collectively titled "Morice," a name invented by Brancusi ...
Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone, created in 1973, was one of the highlights of the Whitney Museum's 2001 exhibition "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977," curated by Chrissie Iles. That installation, composed of a ...
Terence Koh at the Whitney.(NEW YORK)(Whitney Museum of American Art)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... A guard's injunction at the entrance to Terence Koh's untitled, near-blinding installation of white light for the Whitney's lobby gallery recalled the admonition to a child forbidden even a glance at a solar eclipse. An intense 4,000-watt light spilled out of the unenterable gallery, ...
Dash Snow and Dan Colen at Deitch.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... There is one thing that can be said for the "hamster nest"--a room filled knee-deep with 2,000 shredded telephone books and liberally graffitied with strangely humorless slogans and obscene vignettes--that was installed over several party-on days by 30 "volunteers" (friends of the ...
William Powhida at Schroeder Romero.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Extending the mockery of New York magazine's notorious "Children of Warhol" issue (Jan. 15, 2007) and the young artists it lionized and ridiculed, William Powhida nominates one of them, partier and graffiti artist Dash Snow, for particular derision in "This is a work of fiction ...," his ...
Dan Perjovschi at the Museum of Modern Art.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi brought his "indoor graffiti" to the 110-foot-high atrium wall at the Museum of Modern Art this spring and summer. Dozens of very funny and bitingly satirical line drawings in black permanent marker constituted "WHAT HAPPENED TO US?," the artist's lovingly ...
Miles Coolidge at Casey Kaplan.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... L.A.-based Miles Coolidge, who studied under Bemd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldoff, has in the past taken a cue from them by serially documenting the interiors of various suburban garages in bright, clear color photographs. His latest show included the ominously titled Wall ...
Darby Bannard at Jacobson Howard.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Princeton must have been lively in the mid-1950s, when Frank Stella, Michael Fried and Walter Darby Bannard were art-obsessed undergraduates. Imagine these three ferociously smart young men, devouring Clement Greenberg's criticism, traveling to New York to see the shows he discussed and ...
Robert Mangold at PaceWildenstein.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Robert Mangold calls his new series "Column Structure Paintings," but I'd be more inclined to call them drawings or planar compositions rather than adopt his nomenclature. Yes, each work in the series consists of color on canvas. Yet the colors--odd tones, often grayed or acid--seem ...
Myron Stout at Washburn.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Myron Stout (1908-1987) was a slight, modest man who was known to his more famous and flamboyant friends--Ab-Exers and Pop artists--for the almost compulsively perfectionist quality of his small abstract drawings and paintings. He would work on some pieces ...
Heide Fasnacht at Kent.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... For years, Heide Fasnacht has been depicting explosions of various sorts, ranging from sneezes and shattering champagne bottles to fireworks, imploding skyscrapers and nuclear fission. She has worked both on paper, in intricate graphite and colored pencil drawings, and in three dimensions, ...
Rosemarie Castoro at Hal Bromm.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... This exhibition gathered four decades of mixed-medium work by Rosemarie Castoro in a small downtown gallery, supplemented by two offsite installations. Castoro's palette of black, white and gray focused attention on material and form. Featured were renderings of ephemeral and wispy ...
Nicolas Carone at Lohin Geduld.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Over the past three decades, painter and sculptor Nicolas Carone has been carving heads from rocks he finds around his studio in Umbria. For his second show at Lohin Geduld, the gallery brought a large group of these sculptures to the U.S. for the first time. He also exhibited several ...
Rosemarie Trockel at Gladstone.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Rosemarie Trockel's previous show of new work in New York (in 2003-04) felt like a postmodern dungeon, dominated by dark aluminum walls set at sharp angles throughout the large shadowy space of the old Dia in Chelsea. Blades and triangles of aluminum sprang from the walls, jutting out at ...
Tom Evans and Bill Bollinger at Mitchell Algus.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... This revelatory show revisited the New York art world of the early 1970s, when process art was widely practiced and approaching critical mass. Rather than round up the usual suspects of that era, Mitchell Algus presented several paintings by Tom Evans alongside sculptures by the late Bill ...
Muntean/Rosenblum at Team.(NEW YORK)(Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Combinations of high and low culture, delicious ambiguities between sincerity and irony, and deadpan remaking of historical art in modern garb--such are the pleasures of recent work by Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum, the Austrian/Israeli artist pair now based in Vienna and London. In ...
"Project for a Revolution in New York" at Matthew Marks.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Most summer group shows are either offerings from the gallery's stable or gatherings of promising young artists. "Project for a Revolution in New York" was an exhibition of a wholly different order. Curated by Mitchell Algus, who runs his own small, adventurous gallery in Chelsea, the show ...
Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The octogenarian master realist Philip Pearlstein--at the top of his game--ornaments and enlivens his recent paintings (dating from 2006 and 2007) with arresting emblems. Here Pearlstein supplies his typically angular, neargothic models with an unusually ...
Jo Baer at Alexander Gray.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... That Jo Baer has thought long and hard about the nature of painting is clear. In her early (1960s-'70s), radically minimal and superbly elegant paintings, defined by their empty, glowing white centers and edged by simple bands of black and another thin line of color, she was attempting to ...
Tina Barney at Janet Borden.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Member of and court photographer to a privileged, distinctly American social milieu, Tina Barney in 1996 turned her large-format portrait camera on a European elite that similarly required special access. The result was "The Europeans," an ongoing study of ...
Sergio Prego at Lehmann Maupin.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... A postindustrial sensibility united the diverse video projections and large-scale three-dimensional pieces in this exhibition (all work 2006). Sergio Prego's sculptural materials and the images he captures with time-based mediums have the feel of discarded, accidental or whimsical ...
Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Thomas Struth's latest big color photographs of museum visitors, taken in the Prado and the Hermitage, perfectly suit our endlessly observing, increasingly self-aware culture. But the new series, "Making Time" (2005), is also a testament to timelessness, measuring the scope of human ...
Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism at PaceWildenstein.(NEW YORK)(Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were famously uncooperative when it came to explaining the origins of Cubism, most art historians agree that its chief catalysts were Cezanne and African tribal art. Without claiming to displace that consensus, ...
Ian Davis at Leslie Tonkonow.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ian Davis has a good feel for the absurdity of life. His faux-naif figurative paintings have the visual elan and comic succinctness of successful New Yorker covers. Davis is interested in repetition and in patterns that he turns into symmetrical ...
Nader Ahriman at Friedrich Petzel.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... De Chirico, Dali and Ernst all applied an academic style of painting to impossible, Surrealist scenarios as a way to express deeply disquieting premonitions of war. In 2006, Nader Ahriman revisited this mode of oblique, anxious social commentary with his "Stromboli" cycle. Ahriman is an ...
Nina Kuo at Cheryl McGinnis.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Chinese-American painter Nina Kuo is a New York artist who has been active in local Asian arts organizations such as the Asian-American Arts Center and Godzilla. She has explored both her personal past--her father, James Kuo, left China in 1947 for New ...
John Evans at Gallery Henoch.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... John Evans is a Boston-based painter of seascapes and landscapes; his subjects range from the coast of Cape Cod and the North Shore of Massachusetts to the meadows of central France. Painting in oil, often on large canvases, Evans offers what first seem to be requiems for less frantic, ...
Chuck Connelly at DFN.(NEW YORK)(Brief article)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Knowing Chuck Connelly's backstory--he is a prolific painter of many kinds of subjects who came to prominence in the '80s as a Neo-Expressionist--does little to change the effect of his recent jaunty, good-natured pictures of Victorian houses. Portraying dwellings in his Philadelphia ...
Judy Ledgerwood at Tracy Williams.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was once introduced to a choreographer at a party. In the course of the conversation I asked her who her influences were. She loftily answered, "Well, George Balanchine," seeming to indicate that no one else but the Master was worth bothering with ....
Ted Riederer at Nicole Klagsbrun.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... "The Resurrectionists" was musician/artist Ted Riederer's smart if only partially successful recent exhibition of new work. In what is already a second New York solo for this freshly minted MFA, Riederer presented an initially inscrutable but heartfelt case for the primacy of form in art. ...
Pia Fries at CRG.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... The mixed-medium compositions in Pia Fries's ongoing project, "Loschaug," were impelled by a book about insects and plants illustrated by Maria Sibylla Merian. A 17th-century naturalist, Merian demonstrated that metamorphosis from a chrysalis--and not (as the church saw it) spontaneous ...
Kelli Williams at Leo Koenig.(NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Kelli Williams applied a virtuosic hand to less-than-virtuous subject matter in her solo debut at Leo Koenig Inc. The artist's meticulously rendered, modestly scaled paintings and drawings depict orgiastic scenes in which anything X-rated goes. Half-naked ...
Mel Bochner at the Art Institute of Chicago, Spertus Institute and Werner H. Kramarsky.(CHICAGO AND NEW YORK)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Mel Bochner: Language, 19662006" was a selection of text-based work by the artist--some 50 drawings, printed materials, paintings and installations--that was part of the "Focus" series at the Art Institute. Among the offerings were four paradigmatic ...
Melissa Ichiuji at Irvine Contemporary.(WASHINGTON, D.C.)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Nasty Nice" was the apt title for Melissa Ichiuji's show at Irvine Contemporary. This first solo gallery presentation included 16 recent sculptures (2006 and 2007), mostly tableaux of gawky, long-legged, flat-chested, big-hipped pre-teens, 21/2 to 4 feet ...
Robert Raczka at the Center for the Arts.(PITTSBURGH)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The abundance of imagery in this exhibition of photographs by Pittsburgh-based Robert Raczka did not overwhelm the viewer as one might expect, perhaps because the various scenes seem comfortably familiar. The 42 photographs (all approx. 30 by 24 inches) of ...
Ann Mikolowski at Center Galleries.(DETROIT)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Ann Mikolowski (1940-1999) was an active artist her whole life, though she was better known in literary circles. For some three decades, she and her husband, poet Ken Mikolowski, ran the Alternative Press, publishing broadsides, chapbooks and other material by leading figures in postwar ...
Patrick Duegaw at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center.(KANSAS CITY)
Oct 01, 2007; ... If the unexamined life is not worth living, Patrick Duegaw has nothing to worry about. In his recent exhibition, "Swimming Through Interiors," the Wichita-based artist subjected his own life--friends, fears, skittish girlfriend, even his coffeepot--to minute examination. Indeed, there is ...
Norman Bluhm at the Station Museum.(HOUSTON)
Oct 01, 2007; ... Norman Bluhm (1921-1999) is perhaps best known for his gestural abstractions of the 1950s and '60s, canvases that range from dense fields of glowing color to dramatic compositions of jagged shapes and skittering lines sparring across finely splattered grounds. This show focused on a less ...
Samantha Fields at Kim Light/LightBox.(LOS ANGELES)
Oct 01, 2007; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Environmental drama of Shakespearean proportions is the best way to describe the unrestrained atmospheric landscapes that constituted Samantha Fields's major solo exhibition, "This Land." The nine medium-size airbrushed canvases (all 2006 or '07) are ...