| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net | | Established in 1996 | Saturday, January 13, 2024 |
| | | Indiana University cancels major exhibition of Palestinian artist | |
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Samia Halaby, who earned her masterâs degree at Indiana University, in an undated photo. Halaby, an 87-year-old artist, has been outspoken in her support of Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza war. (Shanti Knight via The New York Times)
by Zachary Small
NEW YORK, NY.- The first American retrospective of Samia Halaby, regarded as one of the most important living Palestinian artists, was abruptly canceled by officials at Indiana University in recent weeks. Dozens of her vibrant and abstract paintings were already at the school when Halaby, 87, said she received a call from the director of the universitys Eskenazi Museum of Art. The director informed her that employees had shared concern about her social media posts on the Israel-Hamas war, where she had expressed support for Palestinian causes and outrage at the violence in the Middle East, comparing the Israeli bombardment to a genocide. Halaby later received a two-sentence note from the museum director, David Brenneman, officially canceling the show in Bloomington without a clear explanation. I write to formally notify you that the Eskenazi Museum of Art will not host its planned exhibition of your work, Brenneman wrote in the Dec. 20 letter, which was reviewed by The New York Time ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day A Glorious Bewilderment: Marie Menkens Visual Variations on Noguchi. Photo: Nicholas Knight INFGM-ARS.
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| Jessie Homer French paints infernos but she sees rainbows | | Seeing Isamu Noguchi through someone else's eyes | | With the fall of a city, modernity kicks in |
Jessie Homer French works in her studio in Mountain Center, Calif., Nov. 17, 2023. The self-taught artist, at 83, has a newly flourishing career. (Joyce Kim/The New York Times)
by Jonathan Griffin
PALM DESERT, CALIF.- On a sunny autumn morning, in Jessie Homer Frenchs garage-studio, up several miles of mountain switchbacks from Palm Desert, a dozen canvases are propped on shelves in various stages of completion. Most are landscapes. Three depict cemeteries, a recurrent subject for the 83-year-old self-taught artist. Standing out among the browns and the greens, however, are two pictures of wildfires, in furious tones of orange, yellow and black. Leaping infernos have lit up Homer Frenchs paintings for years. In 1st Presbyterian (1994), flames lick through the doorjambs of a white-painted church. In Slash + Burn (2000), smoke curls up from freshly set fires in a recently deforested woodland. In the more dramatic Boreal Burning (2022) five feet wide the sky above burning trees is dark with smoke. In Blowout (2020), its an ... More | |
Filmmaker Marie Menken (19091970). Photo: William Wood. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
by Will Heinrich
NEW YORK, NY.- One of the more revolutionary works of art on display in New York right now is a four-minute-long film nearly 80 years old. Called Visual Variations on Noguchi, it was shot in Isamu Noguchis Greenwich Village studio sometime in 1945 or 46. Wielding the camera was Marie Menken, a Brooklyn-born daughter of Lithuanian immigrants who had, until this studio visit, chiefly been a painter. Shes now known as an avant-garde film pioneer, and the jagged, hand-held camera work of this film in particular influenced everyone from Jonas Mekas to Stan Brakhage, who called it his open sesame moment. But A Glorious Bewilderment: Marie Menkens Visual Variations on Noguchi, a jewel of a show that includes other Menken shorts and ephemera as well as a full complement of sculptures, is the first time the Noguchi Museum itself has ever screened it. Its not hard to see why. Using a hand-held 16 mm Bolex, Menken swoops up and down N ... More | |
Ãlvaro Enrigue with his dog at his home in New York on Dec. 7, 2023. For Enrigue, a novelist fascinated with historical detail, the first meeting of the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors is the obsession of a lifetime. (Ahmed Gaber/The New York Times)
by Benjamin P. Russell
NEW YORK, NY.- The Aug. 13, 2021, edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Ãlvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course. Enrigue, 54, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas changed the trajectory of global commerce, urbanism, industry and much else. Modernity itself, he argues, was born in the moment that Aztec emperor Montezuma and Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, first looked each other in the eye in 1519, a clash of empires that set in motion the citys capture two years later. Not a single article, and it was the great city of the Americas at that time, he said. For Enrigue, the rise, fall and rebirth of Tenochtitlan is perhaps the foremost obsession ... More |
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| Larry Collins, rockabilly guitar prodigy, is dead at 79 | | 'Everything has a Time': Cleveland's longest-serving conductor plans his departure | | Russian Oligarch who says he was cheated testifies at art fraud trial |
Larry Collins, the prodigious child guitarist who worked with his sister Lorrie as the exuberant 1950s rockabilly duo the Collins Kids, died on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024, in Santa Clarita, Calif. (Bear Family Records via The New York Times)
by Bill Friskics-Warren
NEW YORK, NY.- Larry Collins, the prodigious child guitarist who worked with his sister Lorrie as the exuberant 1950s rockabilly duo the Collins Kids, died Jan. 5 in Santa Clarita, California. He was 79. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his daughter Larissa Collins, who did not cite a cause. Although they didn't sell millions of records or enjoy widespread radio play, Collins and his sister were ideally suited to the then emergent medium of television and became bona fide stars of the early years of live country music TV. As members of the cast of Town Hall Party a popular TV barn dance hosted by cowboy singer Tex Ritter in Los Angeles they brought an untamed, proto-punk sensibility to the West Coast country and rockabilly scenes of their day. Larry was just 9 years old and his sister 11 when the siblings, clad in matching Western wear, became regulars on Town Hall Party in early 1954. ... More | |
Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestras music director since 2002, at home in Cleveland, Oct. 6, 2023. (Dustin Franz/The New York Times)
by Joshua Barone
CLEVELAND, OH.- One night last fall, Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, walked onto the stage of Severance Hall, crossed over to the podium and faced the audience. He was neither solemn nor particularly expressive; he just flashed a Mona Lisa smile before turning to the players and gesturing the downbeat of a Mozart symphony. For the regulars in the audience, this was a familiar sight. Welser-Möst, 63, is known more for his authoritative, even demanding, conducting than for his showmanship. And what followed that night was also familiar, as the orchestra turned out a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart program, a new percussion concerto and a Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky rarity at the exhilaratingly high level that has led many to call this ensemble the finest in America. Unflashy yet unmatched. Such is the culture of the Cleveland Orchestra, an oasis of excellence, maintained and nurtured since Welser-Möst became its music director in 2002. And while ... More | |
The Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev looks out from his penthouse in Monte Carlo, Monaco, Sept. 18, 2018. (Benjamin Bechet/The New York Times)
by Colin Moynihan
NEW YORK, NY.- As the owner of Monacos beloved soccer team, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is often photographed at matches, has hardly kept a low profile. Yet his appearance on Thursday when he took the witness stand in Manhattan was still rare: a Russian oligarch seeking justice in an American courtroom. Rybolovlev was in court to pursue his long-standing civil claims that Sothebys had helped a Swiss art dealer trick him into overpaying by tens of millions of dollars in art purchases. In two hours of testimony, he responded to questions put to him by one of his lawyers, outlining some transactions over more than a decade with the dealer, Yves Bouvier. In taking the stand to provide his version of events, Rybolovlev has opened himself to cross-examination by lawyers for Sothebys, one of whom is expected to question him Friday about a range of issues, although not about his status as an oligarch. In a pretrial motion Rybolovlevs lawyers asked the judge overseeing the case to bar Sothe ... More |
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| Sean McFarland opens 'Alluvial Fan, Strange Attractor' January 13 at Casemore Gallery | | François Ghebaly opening the exhibition 'The Agreement, The Fool, and The Storm' by Ivy Haldeman | | Asheville Art Museum expands collection with twelve new acquisitions |
Sean McFarland, Eureka Valley (alluvial fan, strange attractor). Inkjet print, 40 x 50 inches, 2022-2023.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery is now featuring Alluvial Fan, Strange Attractor, an exhibition of works by Sean McFarland including the artists first-ever large-scale sculpture. In this new exhibition, McFarland continues his investigation of the interplay, deep complexity, and beauty of the earth as a system, creating a place for us to think about how all is interconnected, including ourselves. McFarlands large-scale photograph Eureka Valley, 2022-2023, shows an abundance of distant alluvial fans across a vast desert landscape, marking where water flowed down mountains to the basin and radiated outward. The deposited sediment creates forms of intricate, branching channels and patterns which appear to replicate at varying scales. In Geology Illustrated, John S. Shelton writes, The fan is a monument to the death of the stream that builds it. Working from a self-generated archive ... More | |
Ivy Haldeman in her studio. Photo: Joe McShea.
LOS ANGELES, CA.- François Ghebaly is now opening The Agreement, The Fool, and The Storm at the gallerys Downtown Los Angeles location, the newest exhibition by the American visual artist Ivy Haldeman. Bikini Atoll is a coral reef made up of a ring of islands that sits some 2600 miles southwest of Honolulu and 5000 miles from Los Angeles. In 1946, after decades of German and Japanese imperial control, the United States displaced the atolls Marshallese population and began to use the islands as a peacetime nuclear testing site. Over the next twelve years, the U.S. military deployed nearly two dozen atomic bombs on land, over the ocean, and in the coral reefs of Bikini. To keep up with the Soviet nuclear program, the United States set off bigger and bigger explosions in the Pacific. Just as the testing was beginning, a Cold War-era race of reverse scale was launched 8000 miles away when French designer Louis Réard co-opted the atolls n ... More | |
Ruth Asawa, Bouquet from Anni, 1994. Offset lithograph on paper, 22 à 15 inches. Edition 26/100. Printer: Magnolia Editions, Oakland, CA. 2023. Collectors Circle Purchase, 2023.40.01. © Ruth Asawa Lanier Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
ASHEVILLE, NC.- The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to announce the acquisition of twelve new artworks, made possible through the generosity of its Collectors' Circle members and additional contributors. The Museum welcomed artworks created throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in various media, representing regionally and nationally recognized artists. These artists included Ruth Asawa, Romare Bearden, Red Grooms, and Louise Nevelson. Additionally, compelling photography by Arthur Leipzig and Cara Romero, as well as unique Pottery by Eugene and works by other artists. The Collectors' Circle, a group dedicated to fostering the exchange of ideas, art learning, connoisseurship, and ... More |
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| Polaroids new instant film with Pantone's Color of the Year 2024 highlights power of human connection | | In Abigail Lane's exhibition 'Doing Time' birds have no eyes or legs | | David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and Pace Gallery, New York present 'Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years' |
In celebration of the 2024 Pantone Color of the Year PANTONE 13-1023, Peach Fuzz POLAROID is launching a limited-edition Polaroid I-Type Film Pack!
BROOKLYN, NY.- Polaroid announces its new edition of Color film, a collectible collab featuring eight instant films in a velvety peach hue. As Pantones Color of the Year, Peach Fuzz, represents a collective longing for unity, warmth and compassion during a time when nurturing these qualities is essential. Feelings that Polaroid photographers often express with the medium of instant photography by visually communicating complex emotions and experiences. Polaroid photography offers a unique visual form of expression, enabling creators to slow down and enjoy what's right in front of the camera. This visual communication is a way for people to express complex feelings that might be difficult to articulate through words alone which is what Pantone Color of the Year 2024 celebrates. Appreciating both the good and the challenging moments and the contrast between them ... More | |
Abigail Lane, Doing Time (Blackbird), 2020.
PARIS.- The series Doing Time, exhibited in Semioses Project Room, is made up of embroidered birds set in boxes closed off by bars. Previously, your works have featured all kinds of animalscats, dogs, insects, pandas, snails that have variously been molded, filmed, photographed, inserted into photomontages, impersonated using costumes and even mummified. What significance do animals have in your work? We are also animalsthe most widespread primate living among all the other speciesbut we have assumed superiority over the rest as we employ, farm, manipulate and dictate territories. We have forever depicted them with wonder, awe and gratitude but as our subjects somehow. Animals are caught between forces: their natural behavioral instincts and the will of Homo sapiens to dominate and control them. Domestication is an interesting, complex agreement. Almost all the animals depicted in my works are trapped in so ... More | |
Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on Cerex nylon, installation dimensions variable, approximate installation dimensions: 132 x 50 x 29 inches (335.3 x 127 x 73.7 cm).
LOS ANGELES, CA.- David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and Pace Gallery in New York are now presenting Sam Gilliam: The Last Five Years, a two-part exhibition of paintings created by Gilliam between 2018 and 2022. David Kordansky Gallerys presentation, on view in all three spaces at its Los Angeles location from January 13 through March 3, 2024, features works from Gilliams Drape series, as well as a selection of watercolors. Paces presentation, which was on view in New York through October 28, 2023, focused on the artists beveled-edge canvases. Both presentations also include Gilliams tondo paintings, a format that he explored in depth in the final chapter of his career. Across both venues, the exhibition is comprised chiefly of artworks that have never been exhibited publicly. It is accompanied ... More |
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In Conversation: John C. Welchman & Hernan Diaz Alonso on Stefan Brüggemann
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Estates of Marjorie and Robert L. Hirschhorn and Stanley Weiss to be featured in Nye & Company auction
BLOOMFIELD, NJ.- Nye & Company Auctioneers two-day, online-only Collectors Passion auction slated for Wednesday and Thursday, January 24th-25th, will feature folk art from the estate of Marjorie and Robert L. Hirschhorn; a curated selection of early American, English and Continental furniture; a fabulous assortment of silver; and a broad selection of fine art and maps. The auction, beginning at 10 am Eastern time both days, will include property from several Tri-State area collections, including a selection of property from the Stanley Weiss collection. Real time Internet bidding and absentee bidding is available on multiple platforms, including Nye & Companys redesigned website. Telephone bidding will also be available, on a limited basis. January is traditionally a month when Americana crosses the podium and ... More
Honor Fraser is opening group exhibition 'SMALL VO1CE' curated by Jesse Damiani today
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Honor Fraser is commencing SMALL V01CE, curated by Jesse Damiani. An opening reception will be held today from 6pm 8pm. [C]ultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition. Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The basketball player hits the buzzer-beating fadeaway in pure flow. The sudden sensation that youre being watched. The artist looks at the work and a small voice inside them tells them its donewithout understanding why. Human evolution is often presented as a story of expanding intelligence. Indeed, our faculties for learning, recognizing patterns, ... More
'Hana Yilma Godine: A Brush in the Universe' now on view at Fridman and Rachel Uffner Galleries
NEW YORK, NY.- Fridman Gallery and Rachel Uffner Gallery are have announced A Brush in the Universe, a solo exhibition by Ethiopian painter Hana Yilma Godine spanning the two galleries. This is the second time the galleries are collaborating to present Godines work, having jointly organized A Hair Salon in Addis Ababa two years ago. The dual exhibition will bring together Godines new paintings of women occupying spiritual, imagined spaces that fuse earthly and otherworldly landscapes. Godine presents her mythical, larger-than-life women in conversation with the universe mountains, rivers, oceans, plants, animals, birds. The paintings, which blend oil and acrylic paint with textiles on canvas, emerge from the artists ongoing research and reflection on the evolving representations of the female body in Ethiopian art and history, from the Archaic mythologi ... More
Powerful solo show by Julie Brook 'What is it that will last?' to coincide with 2024 Scotland Unwrapped
LONDON.- What is it That Will Last? offers an insight into the extraordinary work of Scottish land artist Julie Brook. Capturing the sculptures she creates in wild and inaccessible locations around the globe through film, photography and drawing, this exhibition explores Brooks deep and immersive relationship with each landscape and the natural materials she uses. Originally trained as a painter and often working outside in the landscape, Brooks practice led her to Hoy, Orkney where she studied the captivating cliffs. She subsequently moved to Glasgow, and a couple of years later she discovered a cliff arch on the west coast of Jura, where she lived in solitude over a period of three and a half years observing the daily rhythms and forces of nature. It was here that she had the idea to bring together natures four classical elements - ... More
Then and now: Revisiting the Sopranos' New Jersey 25 years later
NEW YORK, NY.- As much as it was a show about Italian American mobsters, The Sopranos was a show about New Jersey. From scenes of domestic life in a North Caldwell McMansion to after-hours debauchery at a strip club in Lodi, the show captured a snapshot of the Garden State in the late 1990s and 2000s, beguiling viewers with its regional authenticity. The reality factor for Sopranos is whats so important and so effective, said Mark Kamine, the shows location manager and author of the upcoming memoir On Locations, which details his time working on the show. If youre shooting suburban houses, you can go to Long Island, you can go to Westchester. But David Chase, the shows creator, was insistent that his Jersey characters were depicted in the real Jersey. I just didnt think there was any other way, Chase, 78, said ... More
Clown cardio doesn't take exercise seriously
NEW YORK, NY.- Whenever Alex Lee mentions Clown Cardio, he is met with some confusion. People will say, What is that? People dressed like clowns chasing after you? Lee, a 42-year-old technical writer who lives in Los Angeles, said after a recent class. No ones wearing face paint or red noses nor are they necessarily chasing anyone (more on that later) but this hourlong session, which costs $20, incorporated a bicycle horn, mini circus tents from Ikea and carnival-style popcorn boxes. Jaymie Parkkinen, who founded the class at Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, compiles theater games usually reserved for improv warm-ups and turns them into aerobic exercises with clown-themed props: a game similar to blob tag, wherein the tagged link arms and chase ... More
Alice Mason, real estate fixer and hostess to the elite, dies at 100
NEW YORK, NY.- Alice Mason, a real estate broker and hostess whose talent at social engineering reworked the populations of Manhattans most restrictive co-ops the tony apartment buildings that lined Park and Fifth Avenues and for a time altered the nightlife of what used to be known as New York society, died Jan. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100. Her daughter, Dominique Richard, announced her death. When she was a young woman in the 1950s, Mason taught dance rumba, salsa, cha-cha and her earliest real estate clients were actors, including Marilyn Monroe and Rex Harrison. But when she met Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a horsy scion of the railroad clan, she found herself unable to place him in certain buildings. Vanderbilt money, as it happened, was too new for certain communities in the 1950s. ... More
Is what's good for Taylor Tomlinson's career bad for her life?
NEW YORK, NY.- In September, the night before comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: Why do I feel like its not enough? This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. There have been times when I thought Im only good to people 40 feet away, she said. Tomlinson, ... More
Tina Fey on 'Mean Girls' then and now
NEW YORK, NY.- Tina Fey spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 hunched over an old desk in the mildewy back room of a Fire Island rental home. Fueled by coffee and Entenmanns chocolate-covered doughnuts, Fey, at the time the head writer for Saturday Night Live, cracked the script that became Mean Girls on her laptop. She would old-school just sit and eat doughnuts and drink coffee, like a secretary from the 50s or something, said her husband, composer Jeff Richmond. Not glamorous but very conducive to creativity. In the two decades since, Fey has turned her first and only released screenplay into an empire. The original Paramount film, based on Rosalind Wisemans nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, earned $130 million during its 2004 theatrical run and helped make superstars of its cast, which included ... More
The EGOT winner behind Sondheim's signature sound
NEW YORK, NY.- To understand the role of the Broadway orchestrator, seek out composer Stephen Sondheims piano demo for the song Losing My Mind from the musical Follies and then compare it to the version on the original cast recording. The demos tone is wistful and resigned, with a touch of the whiskey bar about it. In the finished version, the song sounds transformed: Ascending notes on the strings, interjections from the brass and crashing cymbals build to a powerful climax, evoking the heartache and inner turmoil contained in the lyric. What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick. I seem to have a nose for the theater, and its really like that, Tunick, prolific Broadway orchestrator, said during an interview in his book-lined study on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If something works, you can almost ... More
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PhotoGalleries
Gabriele Münter
TARWUK
Awol Erizku
Leo Villareal
Flashback On a day like today, Belarusian-French painter Chaim Soutine was born January 13, 1893. Chaïm Soutine (13 January 1893 - 9 August 1943) was a Russian-French painter of Jewish origin. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Soutine developed an individual style more concerned with shape, color, and texture over representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism. In this image: Chaim Soutine, Two Pheasants.
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