Donald Judd (American, 1928-1994), Untitled 1961-1979. Woodcut. Gift of John M. Parker Jr. 2017.121.1
SAN ANTONIO, TX.-The McNay Art Museum’s latest exhibition What You See is What You See celebrates the Museum’s important collection of Minimalist and Conceptual prints, some of which are on view for the first time in McNay history. “This exhibition spotlights the simple and formal beauty of art in its barest essentials,” said Lyle Williams, Curator of Prints and Drawings. “The artworks on view don’t try to tell a story or convince us of anything other than simply what we see, which is the inspiration for the exhibition title.” The McNay has collected Minimalist and Conceptual prints for more than 25 years, starting with the purchase of a suite of four woodcuts by Donald Judd, whose artistic vision made Marfa, Texas an international art mecca. In 2017, Austin collector John M. Parker, Jr. gifted his entire collection of Minimalist and Conceptual graphics ... More
Shortly before 2 p.m. Saturday, a New York City-based performance artist, David Datuna, peeled the taped banana from the wall and devoured it, an Instagram video posted by Datuna showed.
by Neil Vigdor
MIAMI(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- In plain sight of art aficionados and influencers, a prankster removed a $120,000 banana from an Art Basel exhibition in Miami Beach, Florida, on Saturday, peeled it and then ate it. It happened on the second-to-last day of the art show, where much fuss and head scratching this week has been over a solitary banana — an overripe one — duct-taped to a wall. Three buyers paid between $120,000 and $150,000 for this week for limited-edition pieces featuring a single banana, created by artist Maurizio Cattelan and titled “Comedian.” Each came with a certificate of authenticity and replacement instructions, which perhaps should have included a disclaimer: for display only. Shortly before 2 p.m. Saturday, a New York City-based performance artist, David Datuna, ... More
WOMAN. A Series, first in a five-year series of solo exhibitions of Indigenous women artists.
PHOENIX, AZ.-The Heard Museum announced the opening of Maria Hupfield: Nine Years Towards the Sun. This solo exhibition of Canadian/Anishinaabek artist Maria Hupfield features more than 40 works by the conceptual performance artist. The exhibition, curated by Heard Museum Fine Arts Curator Erin Joyce, takes place throughout several exhibition spaces and range in content from performance, sculptural installation, video and document. The works on view are activated through movement, sound, memory, documentation and collaboration. The exhibition functions as a living archive, which will continually replenish itself with content throughout its five-month run. The exhibition plays with notions of a continuum of culture, entering into conversation with thematic elements from major movements and artists within the 20th century art historical canon. Engaging materially, formally and often conceptually with the practices of artists like Robert Morris, Jimmie ... More
Lebanese-Swiss businessman Abdallah Chatila (L), who purchased items belonging to Adolf Hitler at a public auction in Europe to ensure that they do not get into neo-Nazi hands, receives from Sam Grundwerg, World Chairman of Keren Hayesod-UIA foundation, a certificate of appreciation at the Israeli fundraising association's headquarters in Jerusalem on December 8, 2019. AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP.
JERUSALEM(AFP).- A wealthy Lebanese-Swiss businessman said Sunday he had bought Adolf Hitler's top hat and other Nazi artifacts to give them to Jewish groups and prevent them falling into the hands of a resurgent far-right. Abdallah Chatila said he had felt compelled to take the objects off the market because of the rising anti-Semitism, populism and racism he was witnessing in Europe. He spent about 600,000 euros ($660,000) for eight objects connected to Hitler, including the collapsible top hat, in a November 20 sale at a Munich auction house, originally planning to burn them all. But he then decided to give them to the Keren Hayesod association, an Israeli fundraising ... More
Big Bird Pants in the home of Caroll Spinney, the longtime “Sesame Street” cast member, in Woodstock, Conn., Oct. 11, 2018. Cody O'Loughlin/The New York Times.
NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Sometimes he stood 8 feet, 2 inches tall. Sometimes he lived in a garbage can. He often cited numbers and letters of the alphabet, and for nearly a half century on “Sesame Street” he was Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, opening magic doors for children on the secrets of growing up and the gentle arts of friendship. His name was Caroll Spinney — not that many people would know it — and he was the comfortably anonymous whole-body puppeteer who, since the 1969 inception of the public television show that has nurtured untold millions of children, had portrayed the sweet-natured, canary-yellow giant bird and the misanthropic, furry, green bellyacher in the trash can outside 123 Sesame Street. Spinney, who also performed his characters in live concerts around the world and at the White House many times and was featured in films, documentaries and record ... More
PARIS.-Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris is presenting an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Imi Knoebel in which the artist further explores the fundamentals of painting and sculpture. Revisiting the legacy of Minimal art and Colour Field painting, this new series is characterised by its focus on a unique figure and a more gestural approach to colour, retaining traces of the brush in the densely textured surfaces. A group of large Figura paintings are on display alongside new BIG GIRL paintings and a significant series of large-scale drawings, in which Imi Knoebel experiments with both form and colour. The exhibition highlights the creative process of the artist, whose work maintains a fine balance between improvisation and control. The Swiss art historian Dr. Max Wechsler, a close commentator of Imi Knoebel’s work, shares his viewpoint on the exhibition: From the very moment an artist has made his work public, the perpetual ... More
Mera and Don Rubell in front of Kerstin Brätsch’s artwork When You See Me Again It Wont Be Me (from BroadwaybratschCorporate Abstraction series), 2010.
MIAMI, FLA.-The Rubell Museum unveiled its new space on December 4, 2019. Its inaugural exhibition fills all 40 galleries with 300 works by 100 artists. Drawn from the Rubells’ extensive holdings of over 7,200 works by more than 1,000 artists, the installation is one of the most far-ranging museum exhibitions of contemporary art ever presented. With defining and seminal works by artists whom the Rubells championed early in their careers, and by those who had been overlooked, the exhibition chronicles key artists, moments, and movements in vital art centers over the past 50 years, retracing the Rubells’ collecting journey. Housed in six former industrial buildings, connected and transformed by Selldorf Architects, the Museum unfolds on a single level, with 40 galleries, flexible performance space, an extensive art research library, a bookstore, and an indoor-outdoor restaurant that opens onto a courtyard garden, on a 100,000 square-foot ca ... More
David Wisnia, an Auschwitz survivor who became an 101st Airborne trooper, at his home in Levittown, Pa. on Nov. 2, 2019. Danna Singer/The New York Times.
NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia realized that Helen Spitzer was no regular inmate. Zippi, as she was known, was clean, always neat. She wore a jacket and smelled good. They were introduced by a fellow inmate, at her request. Her presence was unusual in itself: a woman outside the women’s quarters, speaking with a male prisoner. Before Wisnia knew it, they were alone, all the prisoners around them gone. This wasn’t a coincidence, he later realized. They made a plan to meet again in a week. On their set date, Wisnia went as planned to meet at the barracks between crematories 4 and 5. He climbed on top of a makeshift ladder made up of packages of prisoners’ clothing. Spitzer had arranged it, a space amid hundreds of piles, just large enough to fit the two of them. Wisnia was 17 years old; she was 25. They were both Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, both ... More
Vija Celmins' "House #2" (1965) in New York. Haruka Sakaguchi/The New York Times.
by Roberta Smith
NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- From retrospectives to debut shows, and, yes, even the MoMA reopening, art held our attention with innovation and variety. For New York, the signal event of the year was October’s reopening of the Museum of Modern Art with its newly expanded, improved building and more inclusive, historically accurate permanent collection, which fleshes out the epic of Modernism with works by women, artists of color and non-Westerners. There are more creature comforts: lots of chairs by Jean Prouvé and sofas by Charlotte Perriand in the lobby, for example. And for the occasion, all other exhibitions on view were also drawn from the permanent collection, with the latest show from the “Artist’s Choice” series being especially notable. Titled “The Shape of Shape,” it was chosen by New York painter Amy Sillman, who orchestrated a dense ... More
NEW YORK, NY.-Gladstone Gallery is presenting Ugo Rondinone’s thanx 4 nothing, a mutli-channel video installation that pays tribute to the artist’s late husband, John Giorno. Rondinone reconstructs the gallery into a black box theater, creating an immersive environment through the use of black-and-white film, minimalist score, and the rhythmic intonations of Giorno’s own voice. This exhibition is a prismatic paean to the poet, raconteur, muse, cultural icon, and New York fixture. Curator Ralph Rugoff said of the work on the occasion of its installation at Hayward Gallery in 2016: In elegantly spectacular fashion, Ugo Rondinone’s 20-screen video installation, thanx 4 nothing (2015), presents the American poet John Giorno reciting – though ‘performing’ might be a better word – the titular poem. Written on his seventieth birthday in 2006, and framed as an extended and wide-ranging expression of gratitu ... More
In this file photo taken on October 17, 2019 Juice WRLD performs during McDonald's Beat Of My City Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. Jeff Schear / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP.
NEW YORK(AFP).- Chicago-born rapper Juice WRLD, one of a wave of young artists who earned attention on streaming platforms before breaking out as chart-toppers and social media celebrities, died Sunday at the age of 21, according to local authorities. A spokeswoman from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office in Illinois confirmed the death of the rapper, born Jarad Higgins, at 3:14 am (0914 GMT). An autopsy has been set for Monday. Police told AFP that a 21-year-old man had suffered a medical emergency at Chicago's Midway International Airport after getting off a private jet. Celebrity news outlet TMZ reported that Higgins had suffered a seizure. Juice WRLD's breakout single "Lucid Dreams," rose to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018, with his follow-up album "Death Race for Love" debuting in first place on the Billboard 200 earlier this year. "Juice made a profound impact on the world in such a short period of time," his label Interscope Records said in a statement. ... More
Postcards at the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City's annual Fall International Postcard Show at the Watson Hotel in Manhattan on Nov. 2, 2019. Bess Adler/The New York Times.
by John Freeman Gill
NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Some 300 eager collectors descended on a drab hotel conference room in Midtown Manhattan last month for the annual international show hosted by the Metropolitan Postcard Club of New York City. Over two days, as they rummaged through the roughly 800,000 cards of the 30 dealers, most were hunting for obscure, beautiful or intriguing postcards to add to their collections. But an impassioned subset was after something far more resonant and elusive. They were searching for lost New York. This quest meant different things to each of them, for every longtime lover of Gotham has his own, personal version of the vanished city. For Dan O’Neill, a retired history teacher, the streetscape he sought to revisit was that of his 1950s childhood in Bayside, Queens. (“I marched in the Little League parade for eight years,” he said, “and if I come across a ... More
Marcel Ospel, UBS’s chief executive, left, and Donald Marron, then chief executive of PaineWebber, in 2000. Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times.
by Mariel Padilla
NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Donald B. Marron, a prominent financier with decades of executive leadership and a major figure in the New York art world, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 85. Catherine Marron, his wife, said he had been en route to a colleague’s holiday cocktail party and was getting out of a car when he had what appeared to be a heart attack. Catherine Marron said he had only planned to stop by the event for 30 minutes before returning to his home on the Upper East Side to watch a movie with his family. A lifelong resident of New York City, Marron was educated in city public schools and attended Baruch College in Manhattan but did not complete a higher degree, Catherine Marron said. “He was super smart and always had an entrepreneurial spirit,” she said. “He went to one year of college and then left to create his own business and support his mother, brother and sister.” Marron, who was 6-foot-6, was an entrepreneurial ... More
Quote I showed the America I know and observed to others who might not have noticed. N. Rockwell
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Philharmonie de Paris opens an exhibition of works by Pierre & Gilles PARIS.- Designed in close collaboration with Pierre & Gilles, the exhibition explores their relationship to music and its codes and symbols. The accompanying playlist composed by the artists echoes each painting, like a giant jukebox, as visitors discover never-before-released documents and installations of souvenirs and other relics from their illusionists’ studio, offering new insight into their factory of idols. Since 1976, the duo Pierre & Gilles have developed their singular work, a hybrid form between painting and photography. Pierre, the photographer, was born in 1950 in Roche-sur-Yon and Gilles, the painter, in 1953 in Le Havre. From their meeting emerged a precise and original method: they first have their models (strangers, friends or celebrities) pose for them in sophisticated sets they create in their studio. Once the photograph has been shot ... More
Pace Gallery opens an exhibition of Chinese artist Li Songsong's most recent works NEW YORK, NY.-Pace Gallery is presenting the first solo exhibition in the US since 2011 of renowned Chinese artist Li Songsong. The exhibition features his most recent works—canvases whose thick layers of paint depict everyday scenes as well as historical imagery culled from found photographs. Li’s paintings point to China’s many transformations, but eschew narrative in order to emphasize the way images operate as nebulous fragments of a history that is open to interpretation. The exhibition is on view on the 2nd floor of Pace’s new flagship building at 540 West 25th Street until December 21, 2019. In the process of reinterpreting found imagery drawn from public sources such as everyday news items, Li adopts an impartial attitude. “I did not deliberately look for these images,” he explains, “It just happened. For example, a friend ... More
Jason Farago: Art for our moment NEW YORK(NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Greta Thunberg’s denunciations, Gov. Jay Inslee’s presidential run, Getty wildfires, Greenlandic buyout offers: This year, at last, the immensity of the climate crisis fully broke into public consciousness. Culture, like climate, demands assessment at global scale — and if art has any objective in the Anthropocene, it’s to dissolve our ecocidal self-absorption and find our reflections in the lives of those unlike us. Their names are Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — and these friends from Kaunas, Lithuania, the immensely deserving winners of the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale, created an unforgettable performance whose even temper cloaked an ecological sucker punch. In “Sun & Sea (Marina),” an opera staged continuously on an artificial beach, bathers sang blithely of package ... More
Sotheby's to offer a bespoke Rolls Royce Phantom customized by Mickalene Thomas to benefit (RED) MIAMI, FLA.- The House of Rolls-Royce today revealed images of a Bespoke Red Phantom, commissioned to benefit (RED), the global charity and its fight to end AIDS. First sketches of the red-themed creation were revealed by the world’s leading luxury manufacturer seven months ago at the Sotheby’s Galleries in New York City. The Bespoke Phantom was unveiled at a gala event at the One Thousand Museum in Miami, on Wednesday 4 December, as Sotheby’s and RM Sotheby’s launched an exclusive online auction, which will run until 13 December 2019 on sothebys.com. Proceeds from the auction, after costs, will benefit (RED)’s fight to end AIDS. The successful bidder will have the unique opportunity to collaborate with one of the world’s most respected contemporary artists, Mickalene Thomas. The artist will create a custom wrap for the exterior ... More
"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words," a new exhibition, offers intimate view of seminal figure's life WASHINGTON, DC.- Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon made famous for her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, is often mischaracterized as a quiet seamstress, with little attention paid to her full life story. A new Library of Congress exhibition, “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” reveals the real Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist with a militant spirit forged over decades of challenging inequality and injustice. This is the first exhibition of the Rosa Parks Collection, which includes her personal writings, reflections, photographs, records and memorabilia. The collection was placed on loan with the Library in 2014 and became a permanent gift in 2016 through the generosity of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words” immerses visitors in Parks’ words, reflections, handwritten ... More
MEI Art Gallery opens one of the first exhibitions of contemporary Kurdish art in the U.S. WASHINGTON, DC.- Speaking Across Mountains: Contemporary Kurdish Artists in Dialogue, the second curated exhibition at the MEI Art Gallery – the Middle East Institute’s new non-commercial art space and the first of its kind in Washington, D.C., is an exploration of contemporary art by ten artists who ethnically identify as Kurdish. On view from December 6, 2019 through February 20, 2020, the show is curated by Heba Elkayal, an independent curator and writer based between New York and Cairo. The diversity in the featured artists’ backgrounds, narratives and aesthetic approaches reflects the trans-national reality of the global Kurdish community. The artists, many of whom are living in diaspora, practice and produce work on a variety of themes that are not immediately or explicitly related to the topic of Kurdish identity. Instead, their works examine ... More
Exhibition presents historical 19th century paintings alongside 20th century photographs NEW YORK, NY.-Shin Gallery is presenting historical 19th century paintings alongside 20th century photographs by groundbreaking artists Alma Lavenson, Elisabeth Hase, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Imogen Cunningham, Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, Sonya Noskowiak, and Eugène Carrière. Paralleling both portraits and interiors, the exhibition aims to create a serene ambiance focusing on tonalism, pictorialism, and modernism. The exhibition title references to Whitsler’s night scenes, emphasizing the importance of tonal harmony. Above creating an accurate visual representation, the selected works showcase both harmonic and methodical compositions. A sense of stillness is employed through the use of light, shadow and subject matter. For instance, Cunningham’s exotic plants are as enigmatic as they are grounded by the contrast in light and monochromatic ... More
First UK solo exhibition of work by Meryl McMaster on view at Ikon BIRMINGHAM.-Ikon presents the first UK solo exhibition of work by Meryl McMaster (b. 1988, Ottawa), during 4 December 2019 – 23 February 2020. From a rising generation of indigenous artists in Canada, McMaster’s photography explores identity and its distinct cultural landscapes, with extraordinary visual impact. Comprised of new and recent work, the exhibition draws from the artist’s dual heritage to examine broader questions of being, placing emphasis on the social, cultural and environmental contact zones of both her indigenous and European ancestors. McMaster is of the nêhiyawak community (Plains Cree) and a member of the Siksika First Nation (Alberta, Canada) on her father’s side, and Euro-Canadian (British and Dutch) on her mother’s. Fashioning elaborate, sculptural garments and props, her performative self-portraits – recently staged ... More
Yang Jiechang celebrates 30 years of collaboration with the galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger PARIS.- To celebrate 30 years of collaboration with Yang Jiechang, the gallery is presenting the exhibition Dark Writings, in conjunction with the major retrospective entitled Three Souls and Seven Spirits at the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, from November 6, 2019 to February 9, 2020. Two artists supported by the gallery for years. Two parallel artistic paths between East and West. Mark Tobey, from Wisconsin, whose artistic journey is closely linked to his spiritual evolution. His encounter with the Baha’i faith, his travels to the Far East and his contacts with Zen are decisive in his work as well as in the creation of his White Writing. This series, partly exhibited in Shanghai, echoes Yang Jiechang’s Dark Writings exhibition in Paris given at the same time, presenting some twenty works from different creative periods representing the artist’s entire career. ... More
Kunsthalle Osnabrück presents Celebration Factory by Filip Markiewicz OSNABRUECK.-Kunsthalle Osnabrück presents Celebration Factory an evolving exhibition and performance project by Filip Markiewicz which started in 2016 at NN Contemporary Art Northampton and which was continued at Casino Luxembourg (2018) and at CCA Derry-Londonderry (early 2019). While Europe and the world are entangled in their own contradictions in still celebrating economic growth and technical progress as the salvation horizon of humanity, Markiewicz invites to dive in an universe of signs and images which perform the emptiness of our current discourses. His exhibition is partly a stage on which individuals can act as spectators of the decline of their own civilisation, where the myth of automobile ends in desolate cemeteries of rusted engines and isolated, useless tyres, where giant bank notes vehicle the deceptive, obscene spectacle ... More
Exhibition invites audiences to enter the fantastical worlds of six artists MELBOURNE.- Feedback Loops explores the role of the cycle, the echo and reiteration in the personal mythologies of participating artists, and in artistic propositions for alternate worlds and speculative fictions. Featuring new and existing works by artists born in the 1980s, whose embrace of new media – which has become ‘everyday’ over their lifetimes – is tempered with an awareness of this same technology’s complex role in the construction of where we may be headed. The works and worlds presented in Feedback Loops take the form of the theatrical, spectacular and the absurd, in their adoption of the ethics and aesthetics of sampling, and re-interpreting of the artist’s real, fictive and virtual experiences. References to spirituality, mythology, philosophy and personal histories are looped into these worlds alongside popular culture and a wide ... More
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On a day like today, the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum opened
December 09, 2011. NEW YORK, NY.- U.S. actress Claire Danes and Italian fashion designer Valentino arrive at a party to celebrate the opening of a virtual museum dedicated to him, in New York, December 7, 2011.
