News
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04/08/2012
Thomas Kinkade, the famed "Painter of Light," died unexpectedly on Friday at the age of 54; an autopsy has been scheduled for Monday.
From the Los Angeles Times: "Kinkade died at his home in Monte Sereno, an affluent enclave near Los Gatos in the Bay Area. His family attributed his death to natural causes, and officials have not commented further on the case other than to say that the Santa Clara County coroner will perform the autopsy. Millions of his paintings and prints hang in homes around the world, popularity that translated to more than $50 million in earnings for the artist from 1997 to 2005 alone. Kinkade's fame and fortune, however, were complicated by personal and business struggles."
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04/05/2012
The Private Collections Spring Art Tour to benefit Enterprise for High School Students is Wednesday, April 18.
Every spring since 2000, a group of San Francisco’s most passionate art collectors have opened their homes to share their exceptional collections with the public, and raise awareness for Enterprise for High School Students (EHSS) at the same time. Private Collections takes place in seven homes simultaneously on Wednesday, April 18 from 5:30-6:30, in neighborhoods ranging from the Castro to Sea Cliff to SOMA to Cow Hollow. This year, the tour will include the collections of Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Lynn Kirshbaum, Mari Iki and Martin Maguss, Richard and Lenore Niles, Graham Schneider, Stuart Sproule and Daniel Rowen, and Jack Wendler. For more information and for tickets, visit http://www.privatecollections.org/index.html.
Art Practical is proud to be a media sponsor for Private Collections and part of the employer network for EHSS.
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04/05/2012
Sculptor Elizabeth Catlett died in her sleep on Monday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at age 96.
from the New York Times: Her "abstracted sculptures of the human form reflected her deep concern with the African-American experience and the struggle for civil rights...In her smoothly modeled clay, wood and stone sculptures, and vigorous woodcuts and linocuts, Ms. Catlett drew on her experience as an African-American woman who had come of age at a time of widespread segregation and who had felt its sting. But her art had other influences, including pre-Columbian sculpture, Henry Moore’s sensuous reclining nudes and Diego Rivera’s political murals.
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04/04/2012
Engineering professor pursues theory that artist Giorgio Vasari could have concealed a mural by Leonard da Vinci in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.
From Artinfo: "Could a lost fresco by Leonardo da Vinci have remained hidden behind another wall painting in Florence for more than 450 years? It’s a tantalizing idea, and one that Maurizio Seracini has been pursuing since the 1970s. Last December, after receiving permission from Florentine authorities, Seracini and his team drilled six holes in the wall painting that may conceal da Vinci’s “Battle of Anghiari.” But critics are saying that there are even more holes in the theory and the science behind it.
Seracini, an engineering professor at the University of California at San Diego, first suspected that Vasari may have preserved the lost Leonardo behind his own fresco when he noticed a flag in Vasari’s painting that reads “cerca trova” — 'seek and you will find.'”
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04/04/2012
Over one hundred art museums have partnered with Google Art Project, a website that provides virtual tours and digitized artworks to online visitors.
From Artforum: "The project launched last year with seventeen museums, none of which were from the United States. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rubin Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the White House have now joined, supplying Google with high-resolution digital images of selected artworks. The site currently includes over thirty thousand artworks."
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04/02/2012
The paintings of a prolific forger, donated to museums throughout the U.S., are the subject of an exhibition at the University of Cincinnati.
From the New York Times: "Curators say they are putting on display more than ninety forgeries by Mark A. Landis, an eccentric painter who donated dozens of phony works to museums around the country for more than 25 years before being found out in 2008. The tongue-in-cheek show, “Faux Real,” open(ed), appropriately enough, on April Fool’s Day, and includes copies of paintings ostensibly by masters, including a fake Picasso that fooled the Cummer Museum of Arts and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida."
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03/30/2012
The Portland Museum has received a $2 million gift to create an endowment for the modern and contemporary art curatorship.
From Artforum: "D. K. Row reports in The Oregonian that the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation has given the Portland Art Museum a $2 million gift that will be used to fund the museum’s curatorship of modern and contemporary art. The position is currently held by Bruce Guenther. The gift is the latest in a series of $2 million gifts by various donors, each used to fund one of the institution’s curatorial posts. Thus far, five of the museum’s eight curatorial positions have been funded."
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03/29/2012
a book of myths/in which/our names do not appear: feminist poet Adrienne Rich passed away Tuesday at home in Santa Cruz at age eighty-two.
from the New York Times: "Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis.
Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s."
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03/27/2012
Hilton Kramer, former New York Times art critic and founding editor of the New Criterion, dies at age eighty-four of heart failure.
from the New York Times: "Hilton Kramer, whose clear, incisive style and combative temperament made him one of the most influential critics of his era, died early Tuesday in Harpswell, Me...He was a passionate defender of high art against the claims of popular culture and saw himself not simply as a critic offering informed opinion on this or that artist, but also as a warrior upholding the values that made civilized life worthwhile.
This stance became more marked as political art and its advocates came to the fore, igniting the culture wars of the early 1980s, a struggle in which Mr. Kramer took a leading role as the editor of The New Criterion, where he was also a frequent contributor. In its pages, Mr. Kramer took dead aim at a long list of targets: creeping populism at leading art museums; the incursion of politics into artistic production and curatorial decision making; the fecklessness, as he saw it, of the National Endowment for the Arts; and the decline of intellectual standards in the culture at large."
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03/27/2012
The Art Newspaper reports its annual survey of the best attended exhibitions for 2011; “The Magical World of Escher” had the highest daily attendance.
From the Art Newspaper: "Rather than a US, European or Japanese institution, a Brazilian one, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil’s (CCBB) Rio de Janeiro space, comes out on top. The former bank building in the city’s centre hosted no less than three exhibitions that have made the top ten. All were free (indicated by an asterisk in the table), with The Magical World of Escher being the most popular (9,700 visitors a day)."
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03/27/2012
Retired MoMA chief curator John Elderfield to organize museum-style exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery.
From the New York Times: "Mr. Elderfield is joining the Gagosian Gallery, where he will be organizing museum-style exhibitions along the lines of the Picasso shows that John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, has put together there over the last few years. 'I’ve admired many of the exhibitions that have been done at Gagosian,'Mr. Elderfield said in a telephone interview... “Things are so different these days as the worlds of museums and galleries keep getting closer and closer.”
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03/23/2012
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired Edward Hopper's Intermission (1963), among the artist's largest and most ambitious paintings.
From SFMOMA's website: "Intermission was acquired from Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, in part through gifts from the Fisher and Schwab families, and will immediately go on view to the public at SFMOMA on Friday, March 23. Intermission was painted in March and April of 1963, and was one of the last four paintings that Hopper finished before his death in 1967. Measuring 40 by 60 inches, it is among his largest paintings and evokes the artist's signature dramatic cropping of cinematic camera angles, and the high-keyed lighting of stagecraft."
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03/22/2012
Anthony Discenza's Mail Art edition to hit mailboxes soon! Subscribe by Saturday, March 31, to receive yours.
We'll be mailing From An Ongoing Series of Potential Assertions About this Work, by Anthony Discenza, to subscribers early next week. There are still a few days left to sign up and receive Discenza's crytic and intriguing excavation of Art Practical's archive as part of the subscription. Starting April 1, new subscribers will need to purchase Discenza's edition separately. For more information and to purchase the subscription, visit: http://www.artpractical.com/products/mail_art/
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03/21/2012
New report by Human Rights Watch claims that "abuses are continuing" for workers on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island
From Artinfo: "Human Rights Watch has released a long-in-the-works follow-up report detailing both the substantial progress made in the intervening years as well as the 'continuing gaps in protections' for workers. Though it seems there have been considerable developments in the region since Human Rights Watch's last visit, including the appointment of an independent monitor, the organization told ARTINFO it has continued research informally through more recent, less formal discussions with journalists and workers. The outcome of all this research is that the organization finds that 'in spite of commitments by both the developers and foreign partners to take steps to avoid abuse of migrant workers… and in spite of some improvements in working conditions of migrant workers, abuses are continuing.'"
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03/21/2012
BMW and Guggenheim cancel Berlin stop for BMW Guggenheim Lab after threats of violence from leftist activists.
From Bloomberg: "Threats by left-wing activists in Berlin prompted New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to cancel a planned stop in the city’s Kreuzberg district for its mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab. The project, sponsored by Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), was scheduled to travel to nine cities worldwide over six years to encourage debate and proposals for the future of urban life. Left-wing activists used the Internet to urge protesters to “derail” the project, according to the daily Tagesspiegel newspaper. Their protest was that the project would accelerate the gentrification of Kreuzberg, leading to higher rents and new luxury residential developments." -
03/20/2012
Artist Edgar Arceneaux, arts patrons Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, and philanthropist Roger Wacker are the recipients of the 2012 REDCAT award.
From Artforum: The award is meant to illuminate the partnership between artists and patrons who are defining the contemporary field. Past winners include: Edythe and Eli Broad, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Robert Egelston, and Barry McGee. The award was presented to this year's recipients on March 17.
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03/20/2012
The J. Paul Getty Museum has purchased "The Italian Comedians" despite lingering questions about its attribution.
From the Los Angeles Times: "the J. Paul Getty Museum announced Thursday that it has bought "The Italian Comedians," a little-known 18th century painting. Scott Schaefer, the Getty's senior curator of paintings, said that before deciding about a month ago to buy the oil painting from a London art dealer, museum leaders sought opinions from 'almost all major Watteau scholars in the world,' each of whom had seen the painting in person.The vote was 7-3 in favor of it being either solely by Watteau, who was 36 when he died in 1721, or a canvas the master had left unfinished, to be completed by another hand — possibly his student, Jean-Baptiste Pater, to whom the painting was sometimes attributed during the 20th century."
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03/19/2012
The Charlotte Street Foundation announces a call for applications for its curatorial residency in Kansas City, MO.
With this new initiative, Charlotte Street seeks to provide a high-profile public platform for exceptionally promising curators to immerse themselves in, and actively contribute their perspectives, to the arts ecology of the Kansas City area. The selected curator/s will be awarded full use of the Paragraph Gallery + Project Space to use as a venue and platform for exploring and sharing their ideas through producing and presenting a dynamic program of publicly accessible exhibitions, programs, and events. Curators are sought for two back-to-back terms of 4 to 5 months each, to occur between August 2012 and June 2013. For more information, see: http://www.charlottestreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Charlotte-Street-Curatorial-Res-CALL.pdf
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03/17/2012
Call for Artists: Southern Exposure announces the second round for the Graue Award, sponsored by the Graue Family Foundation.
The Graue Award is an initiative of SoEx Off-Site, a program founded in 2006 that commissions and presents new temporary, experimental work that intervenes and interacts in the social and political spheres beyond the space of the gallery. Southern Exposure is proud to announce this an opportunity for local, national, and international artists to develop and present an ambitious public art project in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013. With the support of The Graue Family Foundation, Southern Exposure is offering a $15,000 award to commission a major public art project. In 2011-2012, SoEx presented the first commission, Manifest Destiny!, by artists Jenny Chapman and Mark Reigelman II. For more information and application, visit soex.org.
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03/16/2012
How do you lift a really heavy rock? First, you need an even heavier crane. LACMA to build 700-ton crane to install Levitated Mass boulder.
from the LA Times: "Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass" -- the 340-ton boulder that recently completed an 11-day trek across Southern California -- will be lifted into place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art using a 700-ton crane. The L.A. Now blog reported Thursday that the massive crane is being constructed in order to lift the rock onto a 456-foot-long slot constructed on the grounds of the museum's north lawn. It will likely be two months before Levitated Mass is ready to be viewed by the public."
