Carnegie Museum Names Photography Curator; Athens Biennale Curators Announced
10.10.08
A curatorial department of photography has been established at the Carnegie Museum of Art, notes Flash Art. The Pittsburgh institution announced yesterday its new department and the appointment of Linda Benedict-Jones as its chief curator. Benedict-Jones, executive director of Silver Eye Center for Photography since 1999, will undertake the position at Carnegie Museum of Art starting December 15. Richard Armstrong, the director at Carnegie Museum of Art, highlighted Benedict-Jones’s outstanding experience and “discerning acquaintance with photography.” The main tasks of Benedict-Jones will be to supervise the museum’s collection (approximately forty-five hundred pieces) and organize the exhibitions and acquisitions. The first show is scheduled to open in summer 2009. Benedict-Jones will also plan a traveling photography exhibition together with guest curator Howard Bossen.
In other news, artistic directors XYZ, who curated the first Athens Biennale 2007, “Destroy Athens,” have invited an eclectic group of curators to contemplate the subject of heaven for the second Athens Biennale. The 2009 team of curators will retain their autonomy, while interconnecting creatively and claiming a narrative cohesion which will be further reflected in the exhibition design, by architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis. The multiple visual-art and performative interventions in the public spaces will be curated by Dimitris Papaioannou and Zafos Xagoraris. Exhibitions, installations, public interventions, screening programs, and symposia will be curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Diana Baldon, Christopher Marinos, Chus Martínez, and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.
Haunch of Venison to Move into Royal Academy; Cameron Jamie Wins Yanghyun Prize
10.10.08
The Royal Academy of Arts and Haunch of Venison have announced that the gallery will move into the Royal Academy’s building in February. Charles Saumarez Smith, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, said: “We are delighted by the decision of Haunch of Venison to move into 6 Burlington Gardens. This arrangement will enable us to further our goals in the redevelopment of the Royal Academy, which will be of immense benefit to the art-going public.” Further details about the move will be announced later this year.
In other news, artist Cameron Jamie has been awarded the first annual Yanghyun Prize in Seoul. Created by the Yanghyun Foundation, the prize, which comes doted with a monetary award of one hundred thousand dollars, is the first international award established in Korea to be given without restrictions on form, genre, or the artist’s nationality. The jury, which rotates every three years, comprises an international group of curators including the Museum Ludwig’s Kasper König and the Museum of Modern Art’s Kathy Halbreich. Jamie had his first US solo museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2006. In selecting Jamie, the jury noted that “he is something of an archaeologist, mining our superheroes and broken histories to locate our human connections.”
Lichtenstein Foundation Acquires Archive; Fifty Works to Las Vegas Art Museum
10.10.08
Carol Vogel writes in the New York Times that the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has made its first acquisition: the photographer Harry Shunk’s archive. Shunk, who died in 2006 at eighty-one, was known for photographing art by the likes of Yves Klein, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo, creating extensive records of their work. He also photographed artists, among them Magritte, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, and Lichtenstein. Jack Cowart, director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, said that Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow, who is president of the foundation, had been approached by an appraiser about buying the archive, which consists of more than one hundred thousand items, including more than sixty thousand of Shunk’s printed photographs. The foundation bought the archive in August at a public estate auction conducted by the public administrator of New York. “It was in extreme distress,” Cowart said of the Shunk archive. The foundation will soon begin to organize and study the archive and plans to make it available to scholars. “We won’t keep it forever,” Cowart said. “In time, it will become clear which institution or institutions we should give it to.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, the Las Vegas Art Museum is officially announcing that it will receive fifty artworks from the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel collection as part of a national gift program called Fifty Works for Fifty States, initiated by the Vogels and the National Gallery of Art. The program distributes twenty-five hundred contemporary works throughout the country, giving fifty works to an institution in every state. The Las Vegas Art Museum will receive works by Werner, Edward Renouf, F. L. Schröder, and Larry Zox, among others. As reported last month, Libby Lumpkin, executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum, said the museum is honored to have been selected: "I have been an admirer of the Vogels and their collection for many, many years. They are the quintessential example of how you can be a collector without having an enormous amount of money. They got to know the artists and the gallerists. They followed their instincts. And they had great instincts.” Ten museums were already selected earlier this year, as reported here on Artforum.com.
Doolan Prize Short List in Architecture
10.10.08
Eleven projects short-listed for the Andrew Doolan Best Building Prize in Scotland Award—famously the largest architectural cash prize in the United Kingdom—have been announced, reports the Architects’ Journal. An eclectic mix of projects, the contenders vying for the forty-two-thousand-dollar first prize range from Foster + Partners' mixed-use Quartermile Development in Edinburgh to a family house overlooking Loch Melfort by Studio KAP. Organized by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, the contest is in its seventh year. Previous winners include the Scottish Parliament by EMBT/RMJM and Reiach and Hall's Pier Arts Center in Stromness. The short-listed projects are Dawyck Botanic Garden Visitor Center, by Simpson and Brown; Hawick Corn Exchange restoration, by Gray Marshall and Associates; Quartermile Development, Edinburgh, by Foster + Partners; Castlemilk Stables revamp, by Elder and Cannon; Todlaw Supported Housing, by Oliver Chapman Architects; Culloden Visitor Center, by Gareth Hoskins Architects; Jordanhill School, by Elder and Cannon; Eden Court Theater, Inverness, by Page\Park; Potterrow Development, Bristo Square, University of Edinburgh, by Bennetts Associates; Housing, Telford Drive, Edinburgh, by Gordon Murray + Alan Dunlop Architects; and Tigh na Dobhran, Arduine, Argyll, by Studio KAP. The winner will be announced on November 7 at a Scottish Parliament ceremony.
French Writer Wins Nobel; Curators for Tate's Frieze Art Fair Fund
10.09.08
The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist, children’s author, and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers, reports Alan Cowell in the New York Times. In its citation, the prize committee called Le Clézio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure, and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million. Le Clézio, sixty-eight, published his first novel, The Interrogation, in 1963 and was regarded in the early years of his career as a writer who sought new narrative methods, influenced by travels across the globe, including to Panama, where he lived with an Indian tribe. The announcement followed days of literary argument over remarks by the secretive Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, suggesting that American writers were too much under the sway of American popular culture to qualify for the prize. Le Clézio has written more than forty books, twelve of which have been translated into English. His breakthrough novel establishing him as among France’s leading modern writers is generally held to be Désert in 1980, which won a prize from the French Academy. The Nobel committee said on Thursday that “this work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants.”
In other news, Tate Collection’s Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund, in its sixth year, will have a total of $260,000 to enable the acquisition of major works from the Frieze Art Fair by emerging and leading international artists. The selected works will be announced by Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, at Tate Modern next Thursday. This year, the two international curators chosen for the fund are Thelma Golden, director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Sabine Breitwieser, independent curator and general secretary of CIMAM. Golden and Breitwieser will select the works with Tate curators Ann Gallagher, Jessica Morgan, and Frances Morris.
Álvaro Siza and Steven Holl Win Prizes for Architecture
10.09.08
On Tuesday, the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, reports The Guardian. Siza is regarded by some as the greatest architect Portugal has ever produced, writes Robert Booth, although he is not as well known in Britain: His only British building to date was a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2006. His influence on British architects through buildings in Portugal such as the Adega Mayor winery and the Evora housing development, built after the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1977, has been far greater. His style blends modernism's free organization of spaces with vernacular architecture, so he might use whitewashed stone in Portugal or brick in the Netherlands. That approach has been embraced by a generation of architects including Caruso St. John and Tony Fretton, who have rejected the high-tech movement pioneered by Lord Rogers and Lord Foster and their tendency to use similar components wherever they build in the world. Siza follows Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, and Frei Otto as recent foreign winners of the prize, which is personally approved by the queen and often regarded as British architecture's most prestigious prize. “Álvaro Siza is a profoundly complete architect who defies categorization,” said Sunand Prasad, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. “This is an architecture in which an economy of expressive means is combined with an abundance of spatial revelation.”
In other news, the National Art Club in New York City honored architect Steven Holl with the Gold Medal for Achievements in Architecture yesterday. Holl was born in 1947 in Bremerton, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976, he joined the Architectural Association in London and established Steven Holl Architects in New York City. Notable work includes the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; and Linked Hybrid in Beijing. Holl has also been recognized with some of architecture's most prestigious awards and prizes. Most recently, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art received the AIA 2008 Design and Building Type Awards and the 2008 AIA Honor Award for Architecture.
Abraaj Prize Winners Announced; Photography Book Collection Goes to Scripps
10.08.08
The selection committee of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize today announced the three recipient curator-artist teams of its first competition: Cristiana Perrella and Kutlug Ataman, Carol Solomon and Zoulikha Boubadellah, and Leyla Fakhr and Nazgol Ansarinia. Their projects, currently being created, will be unveiled during Art Dubai in March. The works will become part of the Abraaj Capital corporate collection. “By supporting artists from the MENASA region in this way, we aim to empower them as important agents of cross-cultural respect,” explained Frederic Sicre, executive director of Abraaj Capital. “With increasing awareness of our region’s rapid rate of economic development around the world, the time is right to also promote understanding and appreciation of the burgeoning art community as another important pillar of societal development,” added Sicre. “The spectacular reception that this inaugural Abraaj Capital Art Prize received within the art community exceeded our most ambitious expectations,” said Savita Apte, chair of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. “The ninety-seven applications received from artists from the MENASA region in collaboration with curators from such diverse locations as Santa Barbara and Japan and almost every country in between, reflected a truly global world of innovation, inspiration, and creativity.”
In other news, Suzanne Muchnic reports in the Los Angeles Times that Carol Vernon and her husband, Robert Turbin, have decided to give a trove of about three thousand photographic books and journals to Scripps College in Claremont. The donation, to be used by students, faculty, and scholars, includes entire sets of periodicals and rare volumes on key figures such as Peter Henry Emerson, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams. The donation comes after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently landed a collection of about thirty-five hundred photographs in a combined gift and purchase arrangement from the late Marjorie and Leonard Vernon, parents of Carol Vernon.
Paris Funeral Home as Art Center; Tate's New Rubens; Stone Sells Chinese Art
10.08.08
A state funeral parlor where all the coffins for the dead of Paris were once made has been transformed into a modern art center. The macabre building, known as the "factory of grief," will now play host to dozens of painters, filmmakers, and designers, as part of a plan to revive the city's moribund art scene, reports The Telegraph’s Matthew Moore. Centquatre, in northeast Paris in one of the city's roughest districts, was originally built as an abattoir but in 1905 was taken over by the authorities and converted into the city's central funeral parlor. Although it was not generally used as a morgue, the remains of some concentration-camp victims were stored in the parlor at the end of World War II.
But after a $136 million renovation, the building, in the nineteenth arrondissement, has been transformed into an art space. Artists can set up their studios in the imposing space, in return for allowing the public to wander around and inspect their work. Any reluctance among artists to put themselves on display is likely to be overcome by the shortage of affordable studio space in Paris, which has caused a flight of young talent to Berlin and cheaper European cities. "Paris has a great lack of artists’ work space. This center alone won't solve that, but it will create an effervescence that the city needs," Fréderic Fisbach, codirector of the center, said.
In other news, a Rubens sketch made a decade before his death will join the collections of London's Tate Britain after $9.98 million were raised for it in a six-month campaign. Dated 1628–30, the detailed drawing for the ceiling of London's Banqueting House was sold to the nation for $525,000 less than originally asked, net of tax. “I am simply thrilled that the Rubens sketch has been saved for the nation,” said Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar. “By acquiring this painting, we can begin to represent the magnitude of Rubens's importance in British culture.” The purchase was made possible by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which gave a total of $3.8 million. The next-biggest donors were Tate members, who offered $2.6 million, followed by Tate trustees, who gave $1.8 million in Tate funds. Another key actor in the purchase was the Art Fund, the century-old UK charity set up to help the nation bolster its collections. It gave around $1 million in its largest-ever contribution toward a single work of art.
Bloomberg also reports that Academy Award–winning director Oliver Stone is selling five Chinese contemporary paintings worth a combined $5.1 million in Hong Kong. The lots, by artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Tang Zhigang, Liu Wei, and Gu Wenda, will be offered at Christie's International's auction of Asian contemporary art on November 30 and December 1, the London-based company said in a statement. The highlight of Stone's pieces is Zhang's Bloodline: Big Family No. 2, 1995, which shows a pursed-lipped couple with a tuft-haired toddler painted yellow.
