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LACE (Los Angeles) Port Huron Project Video Installation Opens
Nancy Spero, 1926 - 2009
Nancy Spero, artist, feminist, activist, wife, mother, and a great presence in the art world, passed away yesterday. She was 83 years old. The above video snippet from last year's Art:21 gives some idea of her modesty, her fierce intelligence, her unpretentious brilliance. She will be sorely missed.
Call For VIDEO ARTISTS: Metropolis Art Prize DEADLINE EXTENDED OCT 24
Call For VIDEO ARTISTS: Metropolis Art Prize DEADLINE EXTENDED OCT 24
Babelgum Metropolis is looking for the globe's best and edgiest artists to win US $20,000 and have their work shown on giant advertising screens in Times Square, the neon heart of New York City.
For more information goto:
http://www.perpetualartmachine.com
or
http://www.babelgum.com
The CIGNA 7 Get Themselves Arrested
Outside an opulent skyscraper in Chicago, a white middle-class lady’s picket sign said it all: “She could not wait!” The sign is filled to overflowing with the photo of a radiant young woman. JENNY, 1984-2009, reads the caption. She was only twenty-five years old.
On a cold Chicago morning, some forty or fifty of us had decided that we couldn’t wait for the House and the Senate to pass a mutilated health-care bill. We held signs and chanted slogans in front of the corporate headquarters: “CIGNA profits, people die, Medicare for all.” Meanwhile, seven principled individuals, including health-care professionals and a physician, had gone inside the glass-domed reception hall to sit down on the floor and demand that the giant insurance company immediately approve all doctor-recommended treatments for its insurees. The police was all they got for an answer.
Artists Exhibiting in Vacant Commercial Spaces, New York 2009
Matthew Lusk's Untitled Hobo at the NADA County Affair
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I read an article in the NY Times on Monday, October 12, 2009, entitled "Luring Artists to Lend Life to Empty Storefronts". At the time, I thought it might inspire an interesting posting, especially considering an opening I had recently attended way downtown (south of Trinity Church) which the article failed to mention. Organized by Ellen Scott's Smart Spaces, which "presents contemporary art in the windows of vacant storefronts", the exhibition Regeneration opened October 7th at 88 Greenwich Street and featured window installations by Kim Krans, Hilary Harnischfeger, and Cordy Ryman.
But somehow I lost the impetus for this posting until a series of Facebook "friends" redirected my attention to the NY Times article, the thesis of which is that
as the recession drags on and storefronts across New York remain empty, commercial landlords are turning to an unlikely new class of tenants: artists... On terms that are cut-rate and usually temporary — a few weeks or months — the artist gets a gallery or studio, and the landlord gets a vibrant attraction that may deter crime and draw the next wave of paying tenants.
Jack Pierson: Abstraction at CHEIM & READ
James Kalm makes a walking tour through the recent exhibition of Jack Pierson. Known for his poetic wall constructions in which he uses found letters from commercial roadside signage, this new body of work investigates the formalistic aspect of these shapes without regard for their linguistic meaning. The resulting accumulations resemble totems or snippets of calligraphy. The weathered and faded surfaces evoke a romantic nostalgia yet Pierson’s arrangements remain elegant, humorous and formally satisfying.
Art Review Power 100 for 2009: Year of the Curator
Art Review magazine unveiled their Power 100 list at the Frieze Art Fair in London. Damien Hirst, voted number one last year and the cover boy of Art Review's October 2009 issue, plummeted this year to number 48, indicating a possible reaction to the star artist syndrome occasioned by current economic worries. Although artists such as Bruce Nauman (number 10), Jeff Koons (13), Fischli & Weiss (19) and Mike Kelley (20) are highly placed.
Bruce Nauman
In addition to the expected mega dealers and mega collectors, a number of curators have garnered top power spots, led by omnipresent curator, panelist and art world organizer Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss-born critic and co-director of Exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery. He is this year's numero uno.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA, took second place; he did not even appear in last year's list. Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, came in third.
Tate Reopens Richard Prince Room After Replacing Brooke Shields Image
from Bloomberg.com:
Tate Modern reopened a Richard Prince room that was temporarily closed on Sept. 30 for showing “Spiritual America” (1983), an image of Brooke Shields as an undressed child. The work has been replaced.
Watusi vs. L'Escargot: Another Desperate Republican Attempt to Smear Obama
Henri Matisse, L'Escargot, 1953
Alma Thomas, Watusi (Hard Edge), 1963
The Republican hate machine and the mobs they incite have hardly been reticent on any "issue" which they manufacture or exaggerate in an attempt to bring Obama down. Witness the "Birthers", the "Deathers", the "Tea Party-ers", the "Great White Hopers", and the acolytes of Glenn Beck who embrace his charges of racism against the president.
Given the gleeful mocking of President Obama over Chicago's failed effort to host the 2016 Olympics, and shameless smears of his unexpected Nobel Peace Prize, let's pause and ask: Is there anything conservatives won't turn into a cudgel to bludgeon the president? Take, for example, the art hanging on the White House walls.
The particular issue that Conservative websites have latched onto is the similarity between Watusi (Hard Edge), a 1963 Alma Thomas canvas selected for display in the White House, and L'Escargot (The Snail), a late (1953) cutout by Henri Matisse, which Thomas viewed at MoMA.
