May 2005

Zero Gravity: The Art Institute, Renzo Piano, and Building for a New Century

The Art Institute of Chicago - Gallery 200 - Opens May 31

Overview: In 1999, internationally recognized Italian architect Renzo Piano was commissioned to design the Art Institute’s new north wing. Piano’s plan, which makes imaginative use of natural light and blends of new architectural forms into an established urban fabric, has inspired this exhibition that not only provides a foretaste of the new addition but also evokes the stimulating environment of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, where the architect’s singular visions take shape. Located at the top of the Grand Staircase, Zero Gravity portrays Piano’s studio as a creative place where ideas develop, plans are drawn, and models crafted. On a large table, reminiscent of the one in his Paris office, working documents are displayed. Nearby walls bear plans and drawings that document the project’s development. The models on exhibit are crucial to understanding how the architect’s process. Two-dimensional plans are developed in three dimensions to fully analyze concepts of scale and space. Removed from the confines of a gallery, the work is incorporated into the museum’s own architecture, underscoring Piano’s commitment to designing a building integral to the historic whole. ...

http://www.artic.edu

Alexander I, "The Sphinx who remained an enigma to the grave"

Hermitage Museum: 27 May 2005 - 2 October 2005

Portrait of Alexander I

The exhibition in the Neva enfilade of state rooms in the Winter Palace displays more than 1,000 exhibits which are closely related to the life and activities of Emperor Alexander I. The materials are on loan from the collection of the State Hermitage, as well as from museums and archives of St Petersburg and Moscow. They include archival documents, portraits, and commemorative items. Many of the exhibits are being shown to the public for the first time. "...the Sphinx who remained an enigma to the grave; About him even today they dispute anew..." Thus wrote P.A. Vyazemsky nearly a half century after the death of Alexander I. These words are timely in our day as well, more than 180 years after the Emperor died. ...

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org

Isaac Julien

Centre Pompidou: May 25 2005 - August 15 2005

A selection of recent works by Isaac Julien, including a new production made especially for the occasion, as well as a themed series of films and videos related to the “Africa Remix” exhibition.

http://www.cnac-gp.fr

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: May 24, 2005–August 21, 2005

Roger Fenton (1819–1869) was the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the golden age of the medium in the 1850s. This major loan exhibition unites 90 of Fenton’s finest works from American and European collections, representing his achievement in every genre: Romantic landscapes, intimate portraits of the royal family, stunning architectural views of England’s ruined abbeys and castles, moving reportage of the Crimean War, enchanting orientalist tableaux, and lush still lifes. Following its appearance at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition will travel to Tate Britain, London. ...

http://www.metmuseum.org

Throat: Installation by Jim Zlokovich and Joe Zuccarini

nevada museum of art: May 22, 2005 - August 14, 2005

Jim Zlokovich and Joe Zuccarini, Throat, 2004.

Cloudscapes in various stages of light and movement cover the walls from floor to ceiling and surround a sculptural installation in the NMA media gallery. The theatrical experience references mythology and religion to create a contemplative and evocative space. Both artists reside in Reno, Nevada.

http://www.nevadaart.org

Michaël Borremans: Hallucination and Reality

The Cleveland Museum of Art: May 22, 2005, to Sept. 4, 2005

Michaël Borremans (Belgian, b. 1963) The Journey (True Colours), 2002 Pencil, watercolor, white and black ink, varnish on book cover 17 x 24.7 cm. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is the first solo museum exhibition of work by Michaël Borremans (Belgian, b. 1963) and the only United States venue showing this exhibition. The fully illustrated 120-page exhibition catalogue Michaël Borremans: Tekeningen/Zeichnungen/Drawings will be available at the Museum for $38. Comprising approximately 63 small drawings and paintings on cardboard created between 1995 to 2004, these images are cinematic in their reference and intimate in scale. As Jeffrey D. Grove, Weiland Family curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and a curator of the exhibition notes, “Michaëls drawings are truly free of nostalgia or sentiment. They cunningly engage the tradition of Caricature, with its tragicomic observation of social customs and behaviors and withering indictment of society moribund but unaware.” ...

http://www.clevelandart.org

T to the Oogle

T to the Oogle

Hot on the tails of art hacks that borrow the big G's latter five letters, such as Cory Arcangel's "Doogle" (which turns any search into a hunt for all things Doogie Howser) and Tsila Hassine's "Schmoogle" (which upturns PageRank and sorts the results of any Google search at random), the trouble-making UK collective C6 has released "Toogle." Billed on their homepage as "comprehensive image buggery on the web," "Toogle" (the T stands for text) is a search mechanism that matches a search string with an ASCII imitation of the corresponding top-ranked image by Google Image Search. Popular searches--such as "Bush," "Sex" and "Lindsay Lohan"--generate text-based likenesses composed of the words that have summoned them. This automatic dictionary of words defined by their Google-endorsed visual counterparts (and vice versa) imprints one (text) so deeply into the other (image) as to leave both only faintly recognizable. A nice foil to the authoritative master of logical answers that is Google. - Kevin McGarry

http://c6.org/toogle/

Westminster Retable: London's Oldest Altarpiece

National Gallery: 18 May - 4 September 2005 (Lower Floor Gallery B Admission free)

'Westminster Retable' (before restoration), about 1260-1270. Courtesy of The Dean and Chapter, Westminster Abbey, London.

The 'Westminster Retable' is widely recognised as the most important Gothic panel painting produced in the Anglo-French milieu in the late 13th century. Originally, it may have functioned as the high altarpiece of Westminster Abbey, produced under the patronage of Henry III or Edward I; after the Dissolution of the Abbey it served as part of a cupboard for the display of the royal funeral waxworks and only came to notice in 1725. Although damaged in the post-medieval period, enough survives of its extraordinarily refined and elegant paintings to stress its central place in the history of European art at this time. The painting illustrates Christ's miracles, his nature as Saviour of the World, and Saint Peter's witness to him. ...

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Tony Oursler at the Met: “Studio" and "Climaxed"

MET: May 17, 2005–September 18, 2005

Modern Art, mezzanine galleries Inspired by Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio: A real allegory of a seven year phase in my artistic and moral life (1855), contemporary artist Tony Oursler (b. 1957) created his own three-dimensional studio identical in size to Courbet’s painting. The mixed-media installation playfully merges the artist's professional and personal lives into a narrative fashioned as allegory. A second gallery holds "Climaxed," Mr. Oursler's most recent work. Accompanied by a related publication.

http://www.metmuseum.org

32 works by US abstract art icon Pollock found

NEW YORK: A trove of 32 previously unknown works by abstract art icon Jackson Pollock has been discovered by a family friend, who said on Friday he would like them to tour internationally and be studied by art historians. Alex Matter, a filmmaker who knew Pollock from childhood, said the collection was among the possessions of his late parents who were long associated with Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. Matter said that about two years ago he stumbled upon the soot-covered artworks wrapped in brown paper since 1958. ...

http://thestar.com.my

This "ugly art" was never intended to be seen

AFP Photo: Gerard Sendrey, artistic director of the Begles museum of 'Creation Franche' in front of a...

BORDEAUX, France (AFP) - A museum in southwest France is exhibiting "raw" but often powerful art by the self-taught which was never intended for a public showing. The museum is so relaxed that visiting pupils sometimes take a picture back to their school to study it at leisure. "Here, visitors are totally free -- there's no dictatorship of conformism, no security guard beside each painting -- here you can touch the art," said organiser Pascal Rigeade. The museum, on the banks of the Garonne River in the Bordeaux suburb of Begles, will open its doors late at night this weekend, along with another 1,200 or so museums in Europe celebrating the continent's first "Night of the Museums." ...

http://news.yahoo.com

Florentine drawing under the last Medicis 1620-1720

Louvre: 12 May 2005- 15 August 2005

Furini Francesco 1603 - 1646 Naked woman standing, left arm lifted Paris, musée du Louvre INV 12104 recto © RMN

In 1806, Dominique-Vivant Denon, the Louvre's first director, constituted one of the most exhaustive collections of Florentine drawings. Sixty of these masterpieces are presented to coincide with the publication of Volume II of Inventaire des dessins toscans du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle.

http://www.louvre.fr

Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands

MET: May 10, 2005–January 15, 2006

Renowned as the final refuge of Paul Gauguin, the Marquesas Islands northeast of Tahiti were home to one of the Pacific’s most accomplished traditions of sculpture and decorative art. Created to honor the archipelago’s gods and ancestors, adorn the bodies of its people, and ornament the objects they used, art in the Marquesas encompassed virtually every aspect of sacred and secular life. From everyday items to the sacred images of gods and ancestors, Marquesan artists richly embellished nearly every type of object they used. Celebrated for its elegant stylization of the human image and intricately decorated surfaces, Marquesan art comprised an astonishing diversity of forms, from works in wood and stone to the most elaborate tattooing in the Pacific. Featuring works from the Metropolitan and other museums, libraries, and private collections, the exhibition explores how art captured and enhanced the central themes of secular and religious life.

http://www.metmuseum.org

It's Human Nature

It's Human Nature

Before private ownership, all natural resources were open to everyone. But how open is nature today? Nature has always been a product of human perception, identified one day by our ancestors and continually discovered on macro and micro scales. Mechanisms such as DNA and ecosystems were named in the latter half of the 20th century; and now, we are simultaneously surrounded both by nature in its primal sense, as well as by its artificial and virtual derivations. The latter are becoming more and more real, and amalgamating with 'original nature.' The exhibition 'open nature' at InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo, focuses on the technological, aesthetic and philosophical 'openness' of nature. Yukiko Shikata, ICC curator for the exhibition, says 'open nature presents several different approaches interpreting the new 'nature' that has emerged due to the development of digital information environments.' Artworks by visual and sound artists range from Robert Smithson's ‘Spiral Jetty’ (1970), to r a d i o q u a l i a's ongoing 'Radio Astronomy,' to Fukuhara Shiho and Georg Tremmel's (UK/Japan/Austria) new project 'Biopresence 2055,' for which they will embed human DNA in trees, transforming them into 'living memorials.' - Keisuke Oki

http://www.ntticc.or.jp

Crisis or Opportunity?

Crisis or Opportunity?

CRISIS showcases the results of 6 micro-residencies by artists laurie halsey brown, Rob Kennedy, Manu Luksch, Sophia New, Miranda Whall, and Spencer Roberts & Anneke Pettican at Newcastle-based ISIS Arts. Embracing time-based formats such as evolving web archive, video, slide projection and news feed topography, much of the work derives its force from the instability of our media lifeworld--CCTV, 24-hour satellite news channels--and the teeming recombinations it affords. Manu Luksch's 'Faceless Online' is a video-in-process documenting a society populated by faceless humans. Their omni-surveilled reality is ruptured one day when a journalist finds that she does have a face, a cogent metaphor for the moment you realize you are on camera. halsey brown, meanwhile, takes on the built environment, in her Welkom to Rotterdam!, a website about the city with the densest concentration of architects of anywhere, and anywhere but Rotterdam is where these architects prefer to build. The projects all mine the subliminal slipstream of data overload with narrative schemas and affective logics that reveal it to be fragile--created and creative. - Marina Vishmidt

http://www.isisarts.org.uk

Margaret Michaelis - Love, loss and photography

National Gallery of Australia: 7 May – 14 August 2005

Encounter (Shona Dunlop and Hilary Napier in “Seastudy”)' c.1947 gelatin silver photography Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

Like numerous other émigrés forced into exile during the 1930s, Austrian-born photographer Margaret Michaelis (nee Gross) arrived in Australia with very few possessions. However, she did manage to bring examples of the photographic work she had produced in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, as well as some personal items. The latter included a bundle of love letters from her first husband, Rudolf Michaelis, whom she had married in Berlin in 1933 and divorced in Barcelona four years later. Margaret Michaelis kept these photographs and letters with her throughout her life; the year after her death in 1985 they were donated to the National Gallery of Australia and are now part of the extensive Margaret Michaelis-Sachs archive. The exhibition Margaret Michaelis: Love, loss and photography is based on that archive and adopts a deliberately personal tone, weaving together aspects of Michaelis’s professional and personal lives. ...

http://www.nga.gov.au

John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker

MET: May 6, 2005–September 25, 2005

Fall-Front Desk, 1765. John Townsend (American, 1733–1809). Bequest of Mr. Stanley Paul Sax, Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C. (L76.63)

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the New England seaport of Newport, Rhode Island, became a leading center of American furniture making, with members of the Townsend and Goddard families dominating the trade. Preeminent among these stellar cabinetmakers was John Townsend (1733–1809), whose meticulous craftsmanship and elegant designs set a standard that was seldom matched. The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates his pivotal role in the history of American furniture with "John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker." ...

http://www.metmuseum.org

Catching The 'Media' Bug

Catching The 'Media' Bug

How often do we hum along to a song that we are not currently listening to? Or recite jokes from ads we don't remember seeing? These types of media could be considered, 'contagious,' or so deeply entrenched in the culture and psyche of our daily lives that they seem as natural as our normal routines. This phenomenon is outlined in Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'The Tipping Point,' which outlines the conditions necessary for cultural contagion to grow. In the online world, 'contagious media' might take the form of forwarded emails, obscure websites, senseless animations, or re-mixed video and audio samples. These snippets or cultural artifacts are the focus of 'Contagious Media,' a show of works by siblings Jonah and Chelsea Peretti and curated by Rachel Greene. The show, now up at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City's Chelsea district, features installation and documentation of several contagious media projects by the duo (and their collaborators) including the infamous 'Nike Sweatshop' email forward and 'BlackPeopleLoveUs.com,' both of which have circulated through the inboxes and (dis)graced the browsers of millions worldwide. - Jonah Brucker-Cohen

http://www.newmuseum.org/now_cur_contagiousmedia.htm

Chanel

MET: May 5, 2005–August 7, 2005

One of the most revered designers of the 20th century, Coco Chanel (1883–1971) made an enduring impact on the fashion world. It is the authority and mastery of her work, the resonance of her image of the modern woman as articulated in her designs, and the autobiographical infusion of influences in her collections that confirm her iconic stature. In this exhibition, the spirit of the House of Chanel echoes vibrantly with an unprecedented presentation of more than 50 designs and accessories from the Museum’s Costume Institute collection, Chanel Archives, and other international institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition examines the history of the House of Chanel thematically, revealing ideas and elements of biography as they were expressed in Chanel’s work. Period examples are juxtaposed with the work of Karl Lagerfeld, who joined the House of Chanel in 1983, revitalizing its spirit and identity. Through Lagerfeld’s interpretations and refinements, the historic importance of Chanel is both defined and asserted for the modern woman. ...

http://www.metmuseum.org

Monet

Bellagio Fine Art Gallery (Las Vegas): On view through May 30, 2005

Rouen Cathedral Tour d’Albane (Morning Effect) (1894)

Claude Monet was a leader among the group of 19th-century painters known as the Impressionists. It was his life’s singular mission to capture the essence of nature and light with nothing more than paint and canvas. For the first time in over a decade the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has agreed to loan the majority of the paintings from its world-renowned collection of works by Claude Monet. Claude Monet: Masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presents works spanning five decades of the artist’s career and features many of the his most celebrated and recognizable paintings including Grainstack (1891), Rouen Cathedral Tour d’Albane (Morning Effect) (1894), and one of his most beloved later masterpieces, The Water Lily Pond (1900), which features Monet’s signature Japanese footbridge, one of the most recognizable images in the history of Western Art. ...

http://www.bgfa.biz

identity and desire - Australian Contemporary Art

Art Gallery of South Australia: 30 April – 26 June 2005

The Art Gallery of South Australia will significantly extend its current displays of contemporary art with an additional free display that broadly explores the themes of IDENTITY AND DESIRE in contemporary Australian art. This dynamic exhibition of highlights from the Gallery’s collection examines how artists use different media and modes of representation to question the construction and role of “identity” in contemporary society and how “desire” as one of the most powerful, uncontrollable and fundamental human emotions operates in relation to these identities. IDENTITY AND DESIRE features paintings, photography, sculpture, installation and new media works by contemporary Australian artists including: Hayley Arjona, John Barbour, Kate Beynon, Zhong Chen, James Cochran, Adam Cullen, Dale Frank, David Haines, David Keeling, Shaun Kirby, Tracey Moffat, Rose Nolan, Mike Parr, Patricia Piccinini, Scott Redford, David Rosetzky, Julie Rrap, Darren Siwes and Anne Zahalka. IDENTITY AND DESIRE will be on show in gallery 25 from 30 April until 26 June. Admission is free. ...

http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au

Art in Bloom 2005

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: May 1 - 3, 2005

Ross Sterling Turner, A Garden is a Sea of Flowers (detail), 1912. Transparent and opaque watercolor on board. Gift of the Estate of Nellie P. Carter.

Join us May 1 - 3 for Art in Bloom 2005, Boston's annual celebration of fine art and flowers, sponsored by MFA Associates of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Enjoy our three-day schedule of lectures, demonstrations, and workshops featuring a variety of art topics and media. View objects from the MFA's collections, interpreted with awe-inspiring floral designs by members of over seventy New England garden clubs. Explore the Museum's corridors enhanced with grand flower arrangements by professional Boston-area floral artists. Relax each day at our Elegant Tea. Rejoice and party at the Saturday night Opening Celebration. We invite you to join us in this, our twenty-ninth year of Art in Bloom. ...

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/AIB_2005/aib05.html