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Wexner Center appoints Lindsay Cooper Martin as new Deputy Director
COLUMBUS, OH.- Lindsay Cooper Martin will join the Wexner Center for the Arts as Deputy Director, effective July 16, 2018. Partnering with the center’s Director and senior team, she will primarily focus on integrated and strategic organizational capacity-building across administrative, operational, and advancement functions including marketing/communications, development, and patron services. The role is both inward facing with respect to ensuring best internal practices across multiple departments and outward facing with respect to enhancing the center’s profile and reach across campus, community, and the larger art world—whether regional, national or international. Martin comes to the Wex from the Hammer Museum at UCLA where she served as Director of Administration for three years. She directed the museum’s human resource function ... More

Gay dance company reinvents Mexico's 'folk ballet'
MEXICO CITY (AFP).- With a twirl of his skirt, Jacob Soto taps his strappy high-heels in time to the music, the very image of his all-gay dance company's bold reinvention of Mexico's traditional folk dances. Soto first discovered the dance company, "Mexico in Color," when he went to one of their shows. The 28-year-old psychologist says it was love at first sight. "I said, 'Wow! I want to be up there. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I want to be up there. I don't know how to put on make-up, I don't know how to dance in heels, but I want to be up there with them," he says, his eyes painted in an elaborate feline look topped by enormous fake eyelashes. Mexico in Color takes "ballet folklorico," Mexico's beloved traditional folk dance, and mashes it with the flamboyant transgression of drag. Instead of virile men in sombreros twirling dainty women in flowing skirts around ... More

Ronald Reagan letter to his daughter among more than 100 rare and significant letters up for auction
BOSTON, MASS.- Victor Niederhoffer is more than a well-known hedge fund manager, champion squash player, bestselling author and statistician. He is also a world-class collector. RR Auction will present more than 100 rare and significant letters from his vast collection beginning June 22 - June 28. Niederhoffer only selects content-rich and historically vivid correspondences, and these offerings are the best examples of the diverse writers featured, from the arenas of politics, science, sports, literature and more. From Werner Heisenberg to Thomas Jefferson to Charles Darwin, each intimate letter sheds a rare light on their personal day-to-day lives. In Victor’s own words: “Books and letters have always been an important part of my family life. My father was a policeman in the book publishing area of east New York. In those days, they ... More

New wave new beat at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction
LONDON.- In the late 1970s, New York was a city in decline. Half-deserted, broke and rundown, it was the perfect breeding ground for a revitalised creative scene that reasserted the city’s position at the centre of the art world. The Pictures Generation, graffiti art, hip hop, post-punk, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Neo-Expressionism, second wave feminism and gay right activism: suddenly a socio-political consciousness returned to the forefront of a new contemporary art practice. Now, Sotheby’s forthcoming Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London on 26 June will be led by an exceptional group of 10 works which speak to this exciting moment and its legacy. Spanning nearly four decades of artistic production, the collection will see some of the most famous names in contemporary art, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cecily Brown and Richard Prince, presented alongside ... More

Lesley Foxcroft and Grazia Varisco create original works for Villa Pisani
BAGNOLO DI LONIGO.- The eighth edition of “Contemporary Art at the Villa Pisani” opened on Thursday, 21 June 2018. Every two years, the project invites contemporary artists to devise and create original works for the Villa Pisani Bonetti in Bagnolo di Lonigo in the Vicenza area, a youthful architectural masterpiece by Andrea Palladio. This year the artists who have been invited to take on the morphological and expressive identity of this location are Lesley Foxcroft and Grazia Varisco, both of whom have chosen to intervene with their works both indoors and out. The project was first launched in 2007 by Manuela Bedeschi and Carlo Bonetti, the owners of the Villa. The project is coordinated by Luca Massimo Barbero and curated by Francesca Pola, and put on by the Villa Pisani Contemporary Art Association in collaboration with A arte Invernizzi. The works ... More

Hake's offers coveted original Frank Frazetta cover art, rare comic books, Star Wars, posters
YORK, PA.- So far this year in the world of pop culture, only Avengers: Infinity War has been able to rival the excitement level generated by Hake’s record-setting March auction. Led by a fresh-to-the-market issue of Detective Comics #27 that sold for a staggering $569,000, the sale took in $2.35 million and emphatically validated the demand for Golden and Silver Age comics and original comic art. Once again it’s time for collectors to fasten their seat belts, as Hake’s rolls out a blockbuster July 10-12 online-auction event brimming with rare memorabilia from hundreds of popular categories. The insatiable demand for original comic art and the prices such works are realizing at auction indicate the gap is closing between comic and mainstream fine art. An excellent case study may be in the making with the original art for two Frank Frazetta covers entered ... More

Polk Museum of Art receives Yousuf Karsh photograph of George Bernard Shaw
LAKELAND, FLA.- The Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College announces the donation of a Yousuf Karsh photograph of British author and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Robert and Malena Puterbaugh donated the photograph in memory of John A. Rodda, who passed away on April 30. It will be displayed in the museum in the fall. The Puterbaughs selected the Shaw portrait taken in 1943 because it is one of Karsh’s most important and detailed photographs, Robert Puterbaugh wrote in a memo included with the donation. Karsh said the following about the photograph: “He said I might make a good picture of him – but none as good as the picture he had seen at a recent dinner party where he glimpsed, over the shoulder of his hostess, a perfect portrait of himself. He pushed by the lady, approaching the living image, and found he was looking in a mirror! ... More

Private collection paces Heritage's Long Beach auctions to $18.1 million
LONG BEACH, CA.- Elite private collections of the finest U.S. coins known to exist powered Heritage Auctions' Long Beach Expo. events to $18.1 million June 14-17 in Long Beach, California. An Important New York Collection sold for a combined $6.7 million, laying claim to the top 12 most expensive lots sold during the four-day event. The collection featured a connoisseur selection of 22 U.S. type. Its top lot was the storied Mickley-Hawn-Queller specimen of the 1804 dollar. The Class I "Original" example of the "King of American Coins" was graded PR62 by PCGS and realized $2.64 million. A 1793 Chain Cent, graded MS65 Brown by PCGS and pedigreed to the famed Eliasberg collection, sold for $990,000. Additional highlights from the collection include a 1776 EG FECIT Pewter Continental dollar, MS67 NGC, which sold for $444,000, and a 1796 No Stars quarter ... More

Stéphanie Saadé exhibits at Parc Saint Léger, Contemporary art center in France
POUGUES-LES-EAUX .- Like an echo of Stéphanie Saadé’s practice, this quotation from Montaigne accompanies the selection of works that was made for her solo show “Traversée des États” (Crossing States). The show highlights the index-like character of her work, the constancy of the process, and the measure of how space-time evolves. Her body of work proceeds essentially by transposition, displacement, and metaphor to explore the connections between the private and the universal. A bit like a land surveyor, the artist measures her favorite journeys, the time that exists between autobiographical events and history, or the impossible meeting of the past and the present. From this poetics of intimacy, she not only recreates her personal history and the history of Lebanon, but also plays on temporal and geographic mismatches in order to spark a feeling ... More

Albertz Benda opens exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based painter Kelly Reemtsen
NEW YORK, NY.- Expanding upon her iconic motif of bright feminine portraits with disquieting undertones, Los Angeles-based painter Kelly Reemtsen examines the concept of ‘value’ – how is it assigned, and how can existing frameworks for gauging value be challenged? The women in Reemtsen’s paintings wear festive cocktail dresses that are odds with the utilitarian objects in their hands, such as carpentry equipment or power tools. The works are a celebration of high femme style and subverted expectations. Value, a central piece in the exhibition, consists of six panels depicting a woman either fading or coming into focus. The composition manipulates color value and chroma to either reinforce or minimize the presence of the subject, relative to how the viewer approaches the work. Inspired in part by what the artist has identified as a “a new type of revolution ... More

David Breuer-Weil's monumental sculpture takes 'Flight' in Marble Arch
LONDON.- David Breuer-Weil’s monumental bronze sculptures will be recognisable to many Londoners after high profile installations in Victoria, King’s Cross and the West End. His latest sculpture depicts the virtually impossible – a magical sculpture of a flying man taking off from Marble Arch. A hallmark of Breuer-Weil’s monumental works is the very physical nature of the pieces with their deliberately textured surfaces and, when creating this work, he spontaneously covered the surface of the sculpture in pictures and words. While sculpture, especially bronze, is often thought to represent weight and place, the image of the flying man represents the opposite – weightlessness and freedom. Flight shows an airborne man - the quintessential modern image of a human on the move. In today's world, nobody is bound to one particular place and we think nothing ... More