News
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01/19/2012
Sandra Percival, Executive Director of YU Contemporary Art Center in Portland, has resigned.
from PortlandArt.net: "YU just announced that, "We, Curtis Knapp and Flint Jamison, Co-founders, announce that Director Sandra Percival will leave YU. Curtis Knapp will become Acting Director, effective January 20. There will be complete continuity in the day-to-day functioning of YU and in the assumption of strategic and programmatic planning imperatives at the director level."
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01/19/2012
Pacific Standard Time's performance and public art festival begins today, and the 11-day event will revisit and recreate a number of famous postwar performance works done in the L.A. area.
from the Los Angeles Times: "Some artists are nearly exactly replicating early performances, as with James Turrell using road flares and metal reflectors to virtually set a Pomona College auditorium on fire, a repeat of a 1971 performance. Other artists such as Suzanne Lacy are adapting performances — in her case a multi-faceted anti-rape campaign from 1977 — for a new time and place."
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01/19/2012
Gregory Lind Gallery has announced that Sarah Walker has won a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant of $25,000 for her numerous accomplishments in painting.
from the press release: "Sarah Walker has been continuously recognized for her artistic excellence through museum exhibitions and acquisitions, important artist residencies, solo gallery exhibitions, articles, interviews, and reviews in major art publications over the past decade...The Painters & Sculptors Grant Program was established in 1993 to assist individual artists. The grants are given to acknowledge painters and sculptors creating work of exceptional quality."
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01/18/2012
Wikipedia and other sites are blacked out today to protest legislation currently before Congress that would build a framework for restrictions and suppression of online content.
from Wikipedia: "SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet."
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01/17/2012
The museum at Scripps College in Claremont enlisted a Los Angeles art dealer as co-curator of a Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time exhibition, violating a prominent ethics code.
from the Los Angeles Times: "'Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, 1956-1968' focuses on three artists credited with breakthroughs that transformed pottery from a studio craft to a sculptural form widely appreciated as fine art...Frank Lloyd, a ceramics dealer and the show's co-curator, is a well-known expert in the field who has worked closely with all three artists while mounting 12 shows of their work since 1998 at his Frank Lloyd Gallery in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station...The museum's decision to name a dealer as guest curator goes against the 2009 Ethics Code for Curators published by the American Assn. of Museums (AAM), a leading national professional organization."
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01/17/2012
Artist Dustin Yellin has purchased a 24,000-square-foot Civil War-era warehouse in Brooklyn that he plans to turn into a kind of utopian art center, complete with exhibition hall, artist residencies, and a sculpture garden.
from the New York Times: "'My crazy dream is to create a kind of utopian art center here,' he said last month while standing in the building’s courtyard, where a glittering Airstream trailer sat amid newly planted fig and crabapple trees. Mr. Yellin’s vision includes a large-scale exhibition hall, an artists’ residency program, a sculpture garden and hosts of visitors for symposiums and public programs."
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01/16/2012
Ronald Coles, formerly one of Australia's leading art dealers, faces up to 10 years in jail after being charged with 87 offenses.
from the Sydney Morning Herald: "For more than 30 years, Mr Coles specialised in fine art by some of Australia's most celebrated artists, including Sir Arthur Streeton, Eugene von Guerard, Brett Whiteley and Norman Lyndsay. Advertising on national radio and television, he offered clients an opportunity to boost their life savings through the purchase of investment art, which he bought and sold on their behalf, using their superannuation funds... [An investigation] unearthed dozens of investors who were missing millions of dollars in lost art and money, all allegedly retained by Mr Coles."
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01/16/2012
Ukranian-born photographer Boris Mikhailov was awarded the 8th Spectrum Photo Prize by an international jury on Monday in Hanover.
from ARTINFO: "The award, given every three years, carries with it a prize of €15,000 that is sponsored by the Foundation of Lower Saxony and an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum (Mikhailov's will be in 2013). Previous winners have included Martha Rosler, Sophie Calle, and Robert Adams. 'I became a photographer because I couldn’t talk,' Mikhailov, now 73 years old, said upon winning the prize, a reference to the oppression he faced during Soviet rule of his home country."
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01/13/2012
Steve Cohen, the billionaire financier and art collector, has joined the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) board.
from the Los Angeles Times: "Cohen is one of the world's top collectors of modern art and has made numerous loans to institutions and exhibitions. Cohen currently serves as the head of S.A.C. Capital Advisors, an investment firm headquartered in Connecticut, with offices around the world. His addition to the MOCA board brings the number of trustees to 45, with six officers. In September, the museum announced that philanthropist Wallis Annenberg had joined the board."
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01/13/2012
New York real estate broker and amateur art dealer Richard Silver pleaded guilty to forgery in the third degree for selling several fake "Spot" prints purportedly by Damien Hirst on eBay.
from the Wall Street Journal: "Richard Silver, 50 years old, bought the trademark dot pattern prints on eBay in 2006. He maintains he didn't know they were fakes when he subsequently resold them on the same auction website to six people in Britain, Canada and the U.S. for about $84,000. But, for "expediency purposes," Mr. Silver forged letters bearing the name of Hamburg Kennedy Photographs, a Manhattan art advisory firm."
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01/12/2012
Attendance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York dropped 11% last season, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art saw an increase in visitors.
from Bloomberg: "Attendance at the Museum of Modern Art dropped 11 percent last season to 2.8 million, as the previous year’s marathon motionlessness of Marina Abramovic and designs from movie director Tim Burton proved to be hard acts to follow. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, admissions rose to a record 5.6 million last season, buoyed by the wild outfits and accessories of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Both museums have released annual reports and financial statements for the year ending in June 2011."
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01/11/2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hired Tate Modern chief curator Sheena Wagstaff to head up a new department devoted to 20th and 21st century art.
from the New York Times: "Sending a signal that it intends to become a serious competitor in the field of contemporary art for the first time in half a century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recruited a prominent London curator to oversee a new department devoted to art of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator of Tate Modern since 2001, who has been responsible for programming there and for helping to organize exhibitions devoted to artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Barnett Newman, Jeff Wall and Eva Hesse."
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01/11/2012
Current San Francisco Arts Commission president P.J. Johnston will step down after eight years at the post. A successor has not yet been appointed.
from the San Francisco Chronicle: "P.J. Johnston announced he was stepping down as the commission’s president at its Monday meeting. After spending eight years with the agency, seven of them as president, the new year is “a good time to step aside and let other leadership step in,” said Johnston, a spokesman for several prominent citywide projects, including a series of luxury condos at 8 Washington and the Parkmerced development. He was also ex-Mayor Willie Brown’s spokesman and former executive director of the city’s Film Commission."
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01/10/2012
The world's first online contemporary-art fair, VIP Art Fair, is planning to expand with three new events in 2012.
from Bloomberg: "The first edition of the VIP Art Fair, held last January, was billed as an unprecedented event where collectors were able to access 2,000 works and connect with more than 130 dealers from 30 countries. The debut suffered from teething problems such as a jammed chat system. VIP will also be holding events devoted to works on paper and photography running from April 20-22 and July 13-15 respectively. A three-day “Vernissage” (preview) will be held from Sept. 7-9."
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01/10/2012
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on Tuesday proposed building a museum in the Finnish capital after a yearlong feasibility study.
from the Washington Post: "The total area of the museum, to be built on the waterfront in central Helsinki, would be about 129,000 square feet with 42,000 square feet for exhibition galleries. The organization has several museums worldwide, including in Germany, Italy, Spain and one under construction in Abu Dhabi."
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01/09/2012
An appeals court upheld Fisk University's right to sell a $30 million share in its extensive Stieglitz art collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. But Tennessee's attorney general, who opposes the collection leaving the state, may challenge the ruling.
from The Tennessean: "Fisk and Crystal Bridges officials say they remain committed to each other, even as the court fight over the collection enters its seventh year. The museum, a vision of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, opened in November to accolades from art critics. It is the only U.S. location in Travel and Leisuremagazine’s 'Hottest Travel Destinations of 2012.'"
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01/09/2012
Three works of art, including one by Pablo Picasso and another by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, were stolen from Greece's National Gallery early Monday morning.
from Reuters: "Thieves broke into the gallery in the early hours and snatched Picasso's 1939 painting "Woman's head," donated to the Greeks by the artist in 1949, and Mondrian's "Mill" dated 1905, police said. They also took a sketch by Italian painter Guglielmo Caccia, which was donated to the gallery in 1907. "It all happened in seven minutes," said a police official who declined to be named."
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01/06/2012
Philadelphia-born photographer Eve Arnold, best known for her shots of Marilyn Monroe, died yesterday at 99.
from the Guardian: "Eve Arnold, one of the most distinctive and admired photographers of the 20th century, equally renowned for portraits, fashion and photojournalism, and her long working relationship with Marilyn Monroe, has died aged 99, just short of her 100th birthday in April. Her agency Magnum – where she became the first woman member in 1957 – announced her death "with great sadness", adding that she "passed away peacefully" on Wednesday."
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01/06/2012
In a possible softening of their stance toward a leading dissident, Chinese authorities are allowing artist Ai Weiwei to appeal a fine for tax evasion, Ai’s representatives said on Friday.
from the Los Angeles Times: "Fake Cultural Development Ltd., the company founded by Ai but registered under his wife’s name, received notice on Wednesday that their appeal on the fine had been accepted, according to Ai’s lawyers. The attorneys had submitted a lengthy appeal last month, arguing that police had behaved improperly in detaining him for tax evasion."
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01/05/2012
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has selected Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a leading Bay Area performing artist, activist and educator, as its director of performing arts.
from the press release: "Since 1999, Joseph has been the founding program director and artistic director of Youth Speaks, Inc. in San Francisco, the leading nonprofit presenter of spoken-word education and youth development programs in the country ... Joseph, who is currently performing with his production of Word Becomes Flesh at The Public Theater in New York, will start at YBCA in February. He replaces Angela Mattox, who recently joined the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) as their artistic director."
