No Longer Empty presents The Sixth Borough
Governors Island, NYC
June 5 - October 10, 2010

June 7, 2010. No Longer Empty: non-profit arts organization, collective of curators, administrators, artists. Product of the recession, response to the downturn, creates new curatorial structures to accommodate new economic realities. Has been placing art in public spaces for a year. Eight projects thus far. Takes advantage of commercial spaces throughout city that are empty due to the economic slowdown, "liberating" them for art projects. Not squats. Rather: diverse spaces donated by landlords. An abandoned shoelace warehouse in Brooklyn. A shuttered Tower Records storefront in NoHo. A raw, never used, commercial ground floor of new residential conversion in Chelsea. In each case, there's an attempt to thematically integrate the former use/identity of the space, and the surrounding neighborhood infrastructure, with the current art project. For example, the empty Tower location was re-imagined as a music store, filled with artist projects themed to a music/commerce interface.

G A S S E R G R U N E R T

RODNEY DICKSON-PAINTINGS

June 4th – July 2nd 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, June 4th, 6 pm to 8 pm

524 West 19th Street, New York, New York 10011 (646) 944-6197

James Kalm makes a early summer trek to West Chelsea to imbibe in the latest selection of works by Kelli Williams. If the Marquee De Sade was living in New York, surfing the internet, indulging in high colonics and hanging out with Brooklyn hipsters while writing "The 120 days of Sodom" Williams would be a shoe-in for creating the illustrations. Her obsessively detailed and patterned works challenge nearly every hierarchical notion of propriety and decorum, while simultaneously extending a formerly unfashionable legacy of fantastical Feminist Surrealist painting.

from Abu Muqawama.

from Max Boot's op-ed in the June 1, 2010 Wall Street Journal:

Israeli officials are right to say the operation was justified and that the blood was on the hands of the pro-Hamas activists. Right, but irrelevant.

From Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 98.

The death was reported by Wendy Williams, the managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

James Kalm bikes the fifteen miles from South Brooklyn to Long Island City Queens to bring viewers these glimpses of "Greater New York". This exhibition, in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art, is perhaps one of the most prestigious shows in America, and has launched the careers of dozens of today's most recognized artists. Organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield, Greater New York features young and emerging artists and highlights contemporary trends and tendencies according to the curators. Included in Part II are views of works by: Sam Moyer, Dave Miko, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Caleb Considine, Ryan McNamara, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Hank Willis Thomas, Zipora Fried, William Cordova, Tauba Auerbach, Leigh Ledare and others.

For the "Stuart Davis Group" James Hyde has selected one of American art's most cherished icons for this collaborative investigation. Taking his camera to the Metropolitan Museum, Hyde took high quality close-ups of Davis paintings which he had blown up and digitally printed onto vinyl supports. He then added his own painterly "riffs" using sign painters enamel, and rollers. The resulting compositions re-contextualize both classic modernism and conceptual abstract painting.

UC San Diego professor who studies disobedience gains followers -- and investigators

Ricardo Dominguez, an electronic civil disobedience expert, is the target of probes examining whether his work improperly uses public funds and violates security laws.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucsd-professor-20100507-53,0,482...
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2010 California Biennial

James Kalm bikes the fifteen miles from South Brooklyn to Long Island City Queens to bring viewers these glimpses of "Greater New York". This exhibition, in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art, is perhaps one of the most prestigious shows in America, and has launched the careers of dozens of today's most recognized artists. Organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield, Greater New York features young and emerging artists and highlights contemporary trends and tendencies according to the curators. Included in Part I are views of works by: David Brooks, Lucy Raven, Kalup Linzy, Amy Yao, David Benjamin Sherry, Alex Hubbard, Emily Roysdon, Deville Cohen, Leidy Churchman, Franklin Evans et. al.

Greater New York 2010
MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center
Long Island City, Queens, NYC
May 23 - October 18, 2010

PS1 Celebrates the Presence of the Artist

May 24, 2010. Now is the Spring of our discontent, marked by downward stock market volatility and a continuing Gulf oil spill. But as the Whitney Biennial enters its final week, our critical fancy turns to thoughts of Greater New York. The newest blockbuster in town, with a mission to present the best young and underknown art that our city has nurtured over the past five years, GNY is in its "third iteration". Previous editions were mounted in 2000 and 2005 in what is now rather grandly called the MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center. Those who keep track of such things will note a change in the order of the institutional names - MoMA now stands predominate - indicating that the bride has finally been subsumed by her bachelor, even. Vita brevis, but Ars museums go on longa and longa. Hence the stated "quinquennial" timing of the exhibition, a designation that only a dedicated builder of dynasties could love.

Like the Biennial, GNY has been drastically downsized from over 200 participants in 2005 to the current roster of 68 artists or artist groups. This reduction, to one third its former girth, might lead some wags to call it "The Lesser of Three Greaters" or more simply "The Lesser Greater".