Diagrams of the machine’s “dreams” flash on the screen between pieces by Refik Anadol in “Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dec. 14, 2022. The artist’s AI turned thousands of works from the museum’s collection into a cheerful vision of the next avant-garde. (Vincent Tullo/The New York Times)
by Travis Diehl
NEW YORK, NY.- Color spills into the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, radiating from a 3D animation of sloshing, puffy liquid fizzing in ectoplasmic earth tones and rancid pastels. This is Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” and the roiling shapes greeting visitors from a 24-foot-high wall of LEDs are the museum’s collection of art, design and photography — analyzed, digitized, fed to an algorithm and returned as spectacular slurry. Anadol, 37, is a digital artist known for using artificial intelligence to turn piles of data into spectral, abstract visuals, often at huge scale. To do this, he has partnered with the likes of Microsoft, MIT and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2018, for example, with Google’s help, Anadol projected mind-bending pictures based on the complete archive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic onto the exterior of Disney Hall. An upcoming show at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles promises wavelike imagery stirred by observations of the Pacific Ocean. This ti ... More
Digital x-ray mosaic of Still Life with Bread and Eggs, May 24, 2022.
CINCINNATI, OHIO.- While examining Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs for possible treatment and cleaning, Cincinnati Art Museum Chief Conservator Serena Urry noticed some odd cracks indicating the artwork could be hiding a secret. “I had a hunch,” said Urry. She had the painting x-rayed to see if the still life was painted over an earlier work. Imagine her surprise when the digital x-ray image revealed a well-defined portrait hidden beneath the painting of food and drink on a kitchen table we see today. The still life, made in 1865, is one of only a handful of works that Cézanne dated, so the portrait underneath the still life could be the earliest firmly dated portrait by the artist. It is certainly one of his most ambitious portrait compositions to that date, and several features suggest it could be a self-portrait. “Serena had an excellent hunch. We are lucky it came into the lab when it did, because ... More
In an undated image provided by Radius Books, Kali Spitzer’s portrait of the Indigenous rights activist Audrey Siegl is seen on the cover of “Speaking With Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography.” Holland Cotter, Jason Farago and Roberta Smith round up their favorite books, from museum catalogs of high-profile shows to photographs by Native artists to the treasures of Ukraine. (Radius Books via The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Lots of NFT art collections nose-dived in this year’s crypto crash, but a well-stocked library will never lose its value. Museums, galleries and art institutions have not yet lost faith in high-quality print publications in this screened-out century, and even as venues for cultural debate keep shrinking — pour one for Bookforum, the lively art-adjacent book review that shuttered this week — art publishing remains in fine fettle, with more titles every year than even the most committed bibliomaniac could peruse. My fellow critics and I have selected here some of the best we read in 2022: splashy or studious, affordable or investment-grade, all of them worthy ... More
Adriano Pedrosa, who turned around São Paulo’s leading art museum, will oversee the 2024 edition of the prestigious Italian art show.
NEW YORK, NY.- The Venice Biennale selected Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa as the curator of its next edition, the organizers of the world’s longest-running contemporary art exhibition said in a statement on Thursday. Pedrosa, who leads the São Paulo Museum of Art, will organize the event’s 60th edition, which is scheduled to open in April 2024. Pedrosa has won international acclaim for his leadership of the São Paulo Museum of Art, better known by its Portuguese acronym MASP, where he has been artistic director since 2014. Over the last decade, he was a co-organizer of a sequence of large-scale, centuries-spanning thematic exhibitions — colloquially known as the “Histories” — that have remapped the history of Brazilian art and reexamined Latin American culture against influences and counter currents from Europe, Africa. ... More
Yun-Fei Ji, Sunflower Turned Its Back, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in. 101.6 x 76.2 cm.
NEW YORK, NY.-James Cohan is presenting The Sunfiower Turned Its Back, an exhibition of new work by Yun-Fei Ji, on view from November 17, 2022, through January 7, 2023, at 52 Walker Street. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan. For more than two decades, Yun-Fei Ji has employed the flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to collective human experiences. The artist has an enduring interest in issues of migration and labor, both in the US and China. Each composition is an act of resistance, and a recognition of the resilience of those who have been uprooted in the name of progress. Ji insists that these narratives of displacement and environmental destruction are worth preserving. For The Sunfiower Turned Its Back, Ji shifts from his established medium of ink and watercolor on paper to create vibrant paintings on canvas that possess a quietly ... More
The Little Mermaid Ariel "Part of Your World" Animation Drawing (Walt Disney, 1989). "Maybe he's right... maybe there is something the matter with me. I don't see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad." Joyful year-end event caps $12 million, record-setting year for Animation Art.
DALLAS, TEXAS.- A special Heritage record was broken over the weekend and into Monday as The Art of All Things Disney Animation Art Signature® Auction pulled in more than $3.4 million and led to the highest annual auction results for animation art: $12 million for 2022. Leading the charge were works by Disney artists of its golden age, such as Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, and Carl Barks, though the event extended well beyond such beloved territory. The Art of All Things Disney spanned four days, Dec. 9-12, and 2,000 works from the studio’s most significant feature films, including the largest collection ever of animation art from Disney’s renaissance – its feature animation films released between 1989 to 1999. Many of the renaissance works came from the Peter Schneider Collection ... More
Concept by Leo Villareal. Design & Rendering Credit: Leo Villareal
DAVENPORT, IOWA.- The Figge Art Museum was awarded $1.6 million through Iowa Economic Development Authority’s Destination Iowa Creative Placemaking Fund to support the installation of a new public light sculpture, Evanescent Field, by internationally acclaimed light artist Leo Villareal. Villareal is known for his site-specific light installations, including San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, The Bay Lights; Illuminated River, a public work of art that unites 9 London bridges through one artwork; Multiverse, a tunnel installation at the National Gallery of Art; and more. Villareal uses binary code and simple structures to create complex light sequences through custom software that incorporates a site’s environment, creating a “digital campfire” around which people can gather to experience art. Lighting the Figge is 20 years in the making. When British architect Sir David Chipperfield designed the museum’s current building ... More
NEW YORK, N.Y..- Since December 6th Malin Gallery began the presentation of Laddie John Dill's second solo exhibition with the gallery: Intimate Light, curated by Anna Valverde. Valverde has built one of the most important private collections on Light and Space in the American Southeast and her exhibitions often focus on artists she feels are under-recognized, primarily from her home state of California. Intimate Light, which will end on February 11th, 2023, assembles new works, including drawings and sculpture, by Los Angeles-based artist Laddie John Dill. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a new installation from Dill’s Silica Lightscape series, which the artist first conceived in 1970. Aptly titled EST, it is the largest Silica Lightscape work exhibited on the East Coast to date. It also corresponds to a work Dill made in 2011 titled PST that was exhibited in downtown L.A. in conjunction with the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Ti ... More
Yaacov Agam, Multi Majeur Suite 4, 1990. Photo: Shay Ben-Efraim.
RISHON LEZION.- This exhibition focuses on the reciprocal relations between permanence, structure, and calculated action, and between change, intuition, and unbridled forces, and explores these relations in the art of Yaacov Agam and of Uri Kloss, Ronen Sharabani, Shirley Wegner and Guy Zagursky. The works included in the exhibition give expression to the tension between calculated processes and between emotional, impulsive action. The confrontation with the limits of matter and cultural boundaries raises questions about constraint and liberation from constraint, and about paradigms and their shattering, as part of the attempt to explore creative freedom, change and becoming. In order to create an experience of observation that involves movement, freedom, and constant becoming, Yaacov Agam paradoxically establishes a series of rules based on fixed and precise relations between ... More
George Daniels. A unique, historically important double sided yellow gold wristwatch with power reserve, day and date, 1992. SOLD FOR: CHF4,083,500.
NEW YORK, N.Y..- Stephen Brooks, Chief Executive Officer, said, “Phillips is in the midst of an extraordinary period of growth – one unlike anything we’ve experienced – and the results from 2022 are a testament to both the resilience of the market and our strength within it. On the heels of 2021, our first billion-dollar year, we consigned our highest value work ever – Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled from the collection of Yusaku Maezawa, which realized $85 million. This result led to the most successful auction in company history, and our top three auctions all took place within twelve months of one another, an extraordinary feat compounded by a global Evening Sale sell-through rate of 96%. This momentum can be seen company-wide, Private Sales seeing a 20% increase and each of our auction categories realizing important new milestones, including ... More
Lenz Geerk, Moonpainting V, 2022. Acrilico su tela / Acrylic on canvas, 55 × 45 cm / 21 2/3 × 17 3/4 inches.
MILAN.-MASSIMODECARLO announces Moonpaintings, Lenz Geerk’s first personal exhibition at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan. Marking Lenz Geerk’s first solo exhibition at MASSIMODECARLO, Moonpaintings explores intimate, alienated worlds inhabited by pensive, dreamy figures bathed in moonlight. Placed in melancholic, timeless surroundings, Geerk’s gleaming moon brightens the natural landscape acting as a comforting yet inquiring presence. The moon becomes a continuum in the series, connecting each painting to the next, guarding the figures as it bathes them in its cold radiant glow. Discussing this new body of work, Geerk revealed his newfound fascination, almost obsession with the moon: “the moon has become such a kitsch object that it is almost a bit discomforting to paint it. If something is discomforting, I love to paint it”. Whist drawn to its contemporary ... More
In an undated image provided by the New York Public Library, an advertisement for a showing of “Purity,” staring Audrey Munson inspired sculptures around New York City. (New York Public Library via The New York Times)
by Sam Roberts
NEW YORK, NY.- “What becomes of the artists’ models?” Audrey Munson asked plaintively a century ago. “Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful? What has been her reward? Is she happy and prosperous, or is she sad and forlorn, her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake?” Munson, herself an artists’ model, was neither happy nor prosperous toward the end of her career, when she expressed that lament in a bylined article syndicated by the Hearst newspapers. But her beauty has not been forgotten — if you know where to look. Her face and figure were immortalized throughout New York City. For Adolph Weinman ... More
Candice Hopkins. Photo: Thatcher Keats.
NEW YORK, NY.-The Armory Show announces its curators for the 2023 Platform and Focus sections and the Curatorial Leadership Summit. Eva Respini, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA/Boston, will curate the Platform section; Candice Hopkins, Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project, will curate the Focus section; and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will chair the sixth annual Curatorial Leadership Summit. Expanding on the fair’s thematically unified curatorial sections from the 2022 fair, The Armory Show 2023 brings together three exceptional women curators to examine historical narratives – practices of artists both emerging and established whose work is informed by structures of inclusivity and exclusivity. Focus and Platform will once again join Galleries ... More
Quote What I am after, above all, is expression.... Henri Matisse
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'Merrily We Roll Along' was Sondheim's big flop. Can she save it? NEW YORK, NY.- In the beginning, everybody cried. A lot. “I’d say the entire cast spent the first two weeks of rehearsals in tears, in tears, and they had no idea why,” said Maria Friedman, director of the new, hotly anticipated revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” That’s the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical from 1981, which opened Dec. 12 at the New York Theater Workshop, and all but sold out its limited run the day tickets became available. In a season plump with Sondheim revivals (“Into the Woods,” next year’s “Sweeney Todd”) and literature, this one carries an especially heavy cargo of expectation: the hope that its creator’s most notorious flop might finally be rehabilitated. A British star of musicals and a peerless interpreter (and friend) of Sondheim, who died a year ago, Friedman, 62, tends to talk in breathless, boldfaced italics ... More
Yo-Yo Ma is finding his way Back to nature through music NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL PARK, W.VA.- A hiker’s mouth dropped when she learned why a small group was forming at a rocky overlook here. “Yo-Yo Ma,” she was told, “is going to do a pop-up concert.” She waited patiently, leaning against a wooden guardrail, beyond which lay a serenely undulating vista of West Virginia’s tree-covered mountains, bisected by a horseshoe curve of the New River and dotted with the shadows of scattered clouds. From this spot, Grandview, the landscape appeared nearly untouched, interrupted only by a railroad track along the water. Members of the National Park Service set up a tripod to livestream the performance. Poet Crystal Good stood before the crowd of a few dozen passers-by, and before giving a reading, said, “Let me take a moment, because this is so beautiful.” Then Ma, far from any major concert hall and hundreds of miles ... More
Alice Teirstein, who introduced youths to dance, dies at 93 NEW YORK, NY.- Alice Teirstein, a fixture of the New York dance scene for a half-century as a dancer, choreographer and teacher, and the creator of Young Dancemakers Company, a free summer program that gives budding teenage dancers and choreographers a chance to develop their skills and test them in performances, died Nov. 25 at her home in the New York City borough of Manhattan. She was 93. Her daughter, Eva Teirstein Young, confirmed the death. She began to draw attention as a dancer and choreographer in the late 1940s while still a college student. After her marriage in 1951 to Dr. Alvin Teirstein, she dialed back her dance activities while raising four children. But in the early 1970s, while living in the New York suburb New Rochelle, she became more visible again, performing and staging her own dances in Westchester County and eventually in the city ... More
The Fotostiftung Schweiz and the Kunstmuseum Bern secure Balthasar Burkhard's significant estate BERN.-The Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation for Photography) and the Kunstmuseum Bern have reached an agreement with Vida Burkhard, widow of the renowned Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard, to secure his significant estate and enter into a partnership. The Fotostiftung Schweiz will take over the photographer's archive and the Kunstmuseum Bern will receive four important works from the estate for its collection, thanks to the Gottfried Keller Foundation. Balthasar Burkhard was one of Switzerland's most important photographers. His estate includes his archive, which comprises artistic work as well as pho- tographic commissions. In his will, Balthasar Burkhard designated his wife Vida Burkhard as sole beneficiary and the Kunstmuseum Bern as reversionary beneficiary. This arrangement proved to be unworkable. In the meantime ... More
Melbourne businessman David Bardas AO and family gift important bronze by Auguste Rodin MELBOURNE.- A powerful and imposing bronze by French artist Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), who is widely regarded as the founder of modern sculpture, has been generously gifted to the NGV Collection by David Bardas AO and his late wife Sandra Bardas OAM. Walking man (L’Homme qui marche, moyen modèle), conceived by Rodin in 1899–1900, and cast in 1964 by the Georges Rudier Foundry, Paris, is the first sculpture in the non finito style to enter the NGV Collection. Considered one of Rodin’s most important contributions to art history, his non finito works challenged conventional notions of sculpture at the time by presenting the human form as incomplete. Walking man is Rodin’s most recognised and admired work in the non finito tradition. The gifted Walking Man cast - the only one in Australia - was recently authenticated by the Comité Rodin ... More
Rachel Dickson appointed Deputy Director, Academic at The Glasgow School of Art GLASGOW.- Rachel Dickson, current Dean of Academic Programmes at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts, London) is to be the Deputy Director, Academic at The Glasgow School of Art it was announced today. Rachel, who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA Ceramics and Glass, has an extensive career as an academic leader within creative education. She has significant experience in designing and leading courses across all levels of Higher Education, of interdisciplinary working, improving the student experience and delivering new approaches to education that encompass social justice, responses to climate emergency and equality and diversity. Prior to her appointment as Dean of Academic Programmes at Central Saint Martins she was Associate Head of School at Belfast School of Art at the University of Ulster. In her current role ... More
Arts organizations in New York City will receive $58 million in grants NEW YORK, NY.- More than 1,000 arts organizations across the city will receive grants totaling $58 million from the Cultural Development Fund, the city announced Thursday. A portion of the grants will go to organizations within underserved communities, programs that are dedicated to disabled artists and audiences, and programs that extend access to the arts to groups whose primary language is not English. “We are working really hard to make the arts accessible for everyone,” said Laurie Cumbo, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs. Among the grant recipients are the Parsnip Ship, which produces radio plays; Firelight Media, which supports nonfiction filmmakers of color; and the Noel Pointer Foundation, which teaches string instruments in public schools. Cumbo said she was proud of the application process, which was revamped to include a virtual peer-panel ... More
Adelaide Festival welcomes Associate Director for 2024-2026 ADELAIDE.-Adelaide Festival has announced international arts leader Wouter Van Ransbeek has joined the senior leadership team as Associate Director for delivery of the 2024 to 2026 Adelaide Festivals. Wouter Van Ransbeek, who lives in the Netherlands where he manages his own production company The Rainmakers, will work alongside Artistic Director Ruth Mackenzie and Chief Executive Kath M Mainland. He will support Adelaide Festival collaborations with European-based multi-arts performances and events, to ensure the festival is internationally connected with established companies, as well as scouting emerging work that is cutting edge and of the highest standard. A highly regarded theatrical producer and arts leader, Wouter previously worked as Co-Artistic Director of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) alongside award-winning director Ivo van Hove ... More
CARBON 12 opens an exhibition of works by Anahita Razmi DUBAI.- Anahita Razmi's work of appropriation and transcultural recontextualization takes a novel trajectory in THE RIFF, the artist's 4th solo exhibition at CARBON 12. Through a conceptual use of somewhat offbeat media, the exhibition contrives a visual and sonic assemblage of recurrent symbols of (post-)nationalisms, fading empires, and past cosmopolitanisms, and draws attention to essential questions around living in the world together as people, not necessarily as citizens of national states. Analogue photography, black-and-white aesthetics, and a focus on sound have a strong voice throughout the exhibition. The works concretize abstract notions of processes that participate in coordinating vectors of power, as evident in the series of large-size photographs WORLD MUSIC (2022) taken on a special analogue 6x6 medium format film used by motion picture professionals for sound recording ... More
Anthony Meier's namesake gallery celebrates history of Mill Valley, California with relocation to historic landmark MILL VALLERY, CALIF.-Anthony Meier, president of the Art Dealers Association of America, is pleased to announce the relocation of his namesake gallery from San Francisco to Mill Valley in California’s scenic Marin County. The new flagship will open its doors with In the Shadow of Mt. Tam––a historical exhibition that explores the rich artistic history of Marin County from the 1940s through the 1970s. Founder, Anthony Meier, comments: “The move to Mill Valley comes at a time when the gallery is rethinking how we can best serve our artists and our communities. Having operated out of a residential building in San Francisco for the past four decades, it has always been part of our ethos to go against the grain and have dedicated art-lovers seek us out ... More
Aay Preston-Myint appointed Executive Director of SF Camerawork SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.-SF Camerawork announces the appointment of Aay Preston-Myint as Executive Director. Preston-Myint will begin in their new role January 1, 2023. A Bay Area-based artist, educator, and curator with over 20 years of experience in arts administration, justice and equity work, and programming, Preston-Myint comes to SF Camerawork from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where they have served as Senior Manager of Public Programs and Fellowships since 2018. Preston-Myint stewarded Headlands’ Bay Area Fellowship, a program that radically shifted the organization’s focus to artists rooted in the Bay Area. They also oversaw residencies and grants and produced public programs for over 60 local and international artists that Headlands serves annually. Preston-Myint was a leader of Headlands’ diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives ... More
On a day like today, American painter and illustrator Paul Cadmus was born
May 17, 1904. Paul Cadmus (December 17, 1904 - December 12, 1999) was an American artist. He is best known for his egg tempera paintings of gritty social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures. His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism. In this image: The Fleet's In!, 1934 (cropped view).
