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The Albright Knox

Wednesday Links: the Astor Place Cube Returns, the Albright Knox Get $100 Million, Tumblr Witches Divided

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on November 2, 2016

astor-place

The latest artwork to be launched into space are two manga murals on a Japanese rocket from cartoonist Chuya Koyama. The idea is to get kids excited about “the wonders of the universe.” [phys.org]
Due to Chinese cities’ slash-and-burn style gentrification, in which whole neighborhoods might be demolished for a development, artists are flocking to the nondescript Beijing suburb Yanjiao. Are dystopian-looking cheap condo towers the new warehouses? [The New York Times]
Tony Rosenthal’s “Alamo”, better known as the Astor Place cube, is finally back! New Yorkers are thrilled, and Nicole Puglise cites the city’s enthusiasm as evidence that public art is important. [The Guardian]
Crain’s asked a dozen of NYC’s top architecture firms for ideas to help the city absorb so much new growth. Most of them are pretty good—especially the outer borough transit ideas. Others not so much—is a hotel at the Javits Center really a priority? And can we please make preserving manufacturing/workspaces a part of the discussion rather than always viewing industrial land as “underutilized”? [Crain’s]
Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has won the prestigious Sobey Prize. Who is he and what does he make? From the report, “Working in a variety of media, Shaw explores altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience by creating a post-documentary space in which contrasting ideals and belief systems are put into crisis.” I (Paddy) haven’t even seen the work, but this garbled and pretentious statement makes me want to hate it. [artnet News]
Uruguayan gallerist Diana Saravia was summoned to a police station after displaying a painting by Julio de Sosa that depicted former president José “Pepe” Mujica and his wife, senator Lucía Topolansky, as nude Adam & Eve. The police also confiscated the painting. She’s justifiably upset. What gives Uruguay? [Artforum]
Well, this is depressing. Here’s what $1,400 a month rent will get you in NYC right now. [Curbed]
This Julia Halperin story on how the Albright Knox raised $100 million in three months is just nuts. Last April Janne Sirén, the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, got an email billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach pledging an insane amount of money towards their $80 million capital campaign. Gundlach, who had never donated to the institution gave $42.5m and the museum’s trustees pledged $21.3m this summer. Halperin says the rate of giving works out to over 1 million a day. Sirén had met Gundlach only once the year before, had not been in touch since, but did remember to send his mother flowers on Mother’s Day. Executive Directors, take note. [The Art Newspaper]
We couldn’t be more thrilled for the art collective Current Space, who just bought their building (and one next to it!) from the city of Baltimore for $1. They’re the best, and now they finally have a permanent home! Read about that process in this interview with the collective’s Co-Director Michael Benevento. [Bmore Art]
Headline of the week: “Boneghazi: How a Grave-Robbing Controversy Tore an Online Witch Community Apart.” The piece is a mind-blowing look at the identity politics of Tumblr culture. [Broadly.]

Monday Links: George W. Bush Doesn’t Need to be in the Next Whitney Biennial

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on June 26, 2017

“We did a test with stuntmen and it was so fake. I spoke to a director who told me that I’d never be able to replicate an assault with a stuntman—and I’d never want to. There’s the argument: “How is it real violence if it’s not a real person?” It’s real violence because I was applying real physical violence to the figure, despite it being made up of animated components. I wasn’t really interested in VR, but I was interested in taking a medium with a basis in interactivity and reducing its interactivity. I was interested in the mundane violence we see and the difference between seeing an ISIS video and watching a Quentin Tarantino film.”—artist Jordan Wolfson on “Real Violence,” his #VR artwork depicting an assault shown in the recent #WhitneyBiennial. Wolfson joined @rhizomedotorg curator Aria Dean (@lol_prosciutto) in conversation tonight as part of First Look, a digital art commissioning and exhibition program.

A post shared by New Museum (@newmuseum) on Jun 15, 2017 at 6:14pm PDT

The Times has another story about how gallery closures for small to mid-sized dealers are growing. Reporter Robin Pogrebin lists a number of recent closures—missing Envoy Enterprises, which closed last week, incorrectly citing Team gallery’s closing (they closed only one space), and lumping Andrea Rosen, a huge gallery, into the mix of “mid-sized” galleries. Still, there are a lot of illuminating facts and quotes in this piece. Anchoring the article is a study that found while middle-tier galleries saw their sales decline last year year, the largest outfits saw growth. Glenn McMillan of CRG noted that there are far fewer people visiting galleries thanks to social media and fairs. CRG closed this year after 25 years of operation. [The New York Times]

Libyan artist Takwa Barnosa couldn’t go abroad for art school, and schools in Libya didn’t offer the kind of education she wanted. So she used the money her family had saved for college to launch her own art foundation at the age of 17. [Deutsche Welle]

The Albright Knox is set to more than double its current space under the new expansion plan. The new plans take the museum underground by converting its parking lot into an underground gallery and creating a two-level parking garage. (It can not expand into the surrounding park.) The plan responds to the possibility that self-driving cars may lessen the need for parking – the new parking lot is being built so it can easily be converted into additional gallery space. [artnet News]

Susanne Klatten, the wealthiest woman in Germany, has opened a museum focusing on artwork inspired by nature in Bavaria. [artnet News]

Artist Ryder Ripps loses his patience with Hyperallergic’s lefty coverage and pens a long rant on Instagram over a piece that covered a debate with Jordan Wolfson and New Museum audience members over the politics of white on white violence. He sees it as click bait that stirs discontent for ad dollars in the model of the Huffington Post. He has a point. I too get tired of reading about identity politics and the constant positioning of privilege—as if identifying and quantifying it constitutes useful work. Wolfson’s art has nothing to do with race so the New Museum discussion seemed like it might be the result of a larger national conversation that has been dominating headlines, rather than something that is inherent in the work. [Instagram]

More praise for George W. Bush’s paintings. James Gardner goes so far as to suggest the former president be included in the next Whitney Biennial. We live in strange times. [The Weekly Standard]

Francois Pinault, the French billionaire who owns Christie’s and numerous luxury brands, is opening a museum near the Louvre and Centre Pompidou to showcase his enormous collection of modern and contemporary art. [rfi]

Rashid Johnson has opened a show at the Milwaukee Art Museum of large-scale works. [Milwaukee Independent]

You can now pay $25 for a tour of galleries in Bushwick, “the city’s newest, hippest art area.” [Broadway World]

This is really too bad: Julia Joern, a partner at David Zwirner and their communications lead, has resigned from her position due to health reasons. As someone who has spent years corresponding with Joern and her team, I can personally attest to what a loss this is. Joern was fantastic at her job and was in it for the right reasons—the art. It’s very sad to see her leave the position. She will be missed, not just by her colleagues at Zwirner, but everyone she touched in the process of her work—a league of publishers, scholars and writers. [ARTnews]

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Thursday Links: MICA to Replace Historic Buildings With Condo-Lookalike

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 25, 2016

MICA is demolishing the 1914 buildings that house the school’s Printmaking department and replacing them with this ugly, out-of-scale thing from GWWO Architects. It’s not surprising they opted to render it at night.

Mikolai Napieralski—a former employee of the Qatari National Museum—provides a surreal behind-the-scenes account of the tiny nation’s rise and fall in the art world. Qatar’s former Emir and his daughter Sheikha Mayassa went on an ambitious spending spree to bring Western art professionals, museum outposts, and crazily expensive exhibitions to Doha. All of this was made possible by oil wealth and underpaid foreign labor. Now, that money is gone, and there’s a new Emir on the throne. [Quartz]

With the re-opening of SFMOMA, now the country’s largest modern and contemporary art museum, and a small but loyal collector base, is San Francisco poised to be a major art capital? The article briefly touches on one obstacle: international blue chip galleries are opening branches, but the city is just too expensive for artists and artist-run spaces. [W Magazine]

Ew. You can now buy Truman Capote’s ashes at auction. [artnet News]

Painter Timothy Desmond is suing the state of California over its ban of selling or displaying images of the Confederate flag. His paintings of Civil War battles have been rejected from the Fresno State Fair because they feature the flag. Okay, that law is kinda ridiculous… but so is this painting. [The Art Newspaper]

Italy’s horrible earthquake has destroyed countless historic sites, artworks, and ancient buildings. This is pretty much almost too depressing to read. [The Guardian]

Artist and Bad at Sports contributor Amanda Browder has been wrapping old buildings in Buffalo with fabric as part of a public art initiative led by The Albright Knox. The piece is called “Spectral Locus” and is intended to create a sense of connection amongst viewers. [WGRZ]

Times Square Arts has unveiled a new installation from German artist and architect J. Mayer H that pays homage to the hyper-gentrified zone’s sexier pre-Giuliani era. Titled “XXX Times Square With Love,” the piece comprises a series of recliners in the shape of Xs, which is a fitting commentary on the area’s transformation from porno mecca to sunbathing tourist trap. [Curbed]

MICA is demolishing its printmaking department, housed in a series of buildings from 1914 in a historic district, and replacing it with a product design center that looks like bland, cheap condos. What the fuck? What will this mean for the alley behind the Mount Royal Tavern? [Baltimore Fishbowl]

This interview between multispecies ethnographer Eben Kriksey and artist Katherine Behar is nuts. They discuss Behar’s show, which includes a performance by two Roombas, and the questions look like this: The Roomba really isn’t a species as such. A Roomba can’t fuck another Roomba and make baby Roombas. In that way a plant is different from a Roomba? [Bad at Sports]

The Tate Modern is hiring assistant curators, at about half of the average London salary. The positions pay less than the museum’s cafe pays chefs. [Hyperallergic]

The impending shutdown of the L train, the oncoming development of the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, and the proposed Midtown East rezoning set to affect Manhattan stations along the 7 line is leading some to speculate that property further into Queens will increase in value. [Commercial Observer]

Speaking of Queens, the feud between Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bremar and Mayor Bill de Blasio continues. Five days after de Blasio told reporters he was going to reach out to Van Bremar and give him a stern talking to about affordable housing, he still hasn’t done reached out. Van Bremar is pissed. And rightly so. The councilman has has said will not approve a building of affordable housing units until the developer gets its act together and makes the repairs on the building it runs across the street. He has also said that these units are not actually affordable. Finally, a councilman willing to say what everyone knows—the affordable housing plan is media plan, not an actual plan. [Politico]

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Wednesday Links: Trouble in Canada!

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on October 22, 2014

Gianna Commito’s, “Brig” on Paddle8. Starting bid: $1,750.00

The countdown is on! You’ve got until Thursday, 6 pm to place your bids in our paddle8 auction. Do not miss this. [Paddle8]
There’s no stopping the “amenities” coming to the Lower East Side’s waterfront. Nancy Ortiz, the Resident Associate President of the public housing project Vladek Houses– which happen to be on the Lower East Side waterfront– spoke up last night about the fancy new revamps to Pier42. “[W]e are a community tired of being ignored … [kayaks] don’t fit into the demographic of our community”, she said. [Curbed]
A London power list of powerful people in the arts. No big surprises here. Of the handful of visual arts entries, there’s Amanda Sharp, Sarah Lucas, and Ben Vickers, digital curator at Serpentine. Basically, artists should win a Turner Prize and professionals should work at the Tate or Serpentine. (Writers, bloggers, and alt spaces, forget it.) Our suspicions about circular glasses stand the test of time.[The London Evening Standard, via artnet News]
Trouble in Canada: Parliment Hill’s Centre Block is in lockdown after shots were fired in the building and a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial was shot. [The Globe and Mail]
The Albright Knox is expanding. [The Art Newspaper]
Sotheby’s is creating a new category to handle sales of 20th century art. The hope is to boost sales in the under developed market of modernist works from countries across Europe and around the Mediterranean. These works are by artists who have a strong regional following but are not yet part of the international mainstream. [The Art Market Monitor]
A good reason to head to Philadelphia (aside from this) is a retrospective reviving the century-long career of a female Jewish Ashcan School painter Theresa Bernstein. According to theartblog, curator Gail Levin posits that she was unfairly left out of history for her gender and religion. Maybe. [The artblog]
Another article questioning whether biennials can rejuvenate economies. This one is about New Orleans. [The Art Newspaper]
Has been circulating around the Internets for a few days: King Tut had several congenital deformities which may have led to his early death. More evidence has emerged that his parents were siblings. [Tabloidy images at the Daily Mail; Research from the BBC documentary]

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Friday Links: New York Times Edition

by Paddy Johnson Corinna Kirsch Matthew Leifheit on October 4, 2013

What looks like a great model for community funding has been going on in Detroit for the last three years. SOUP, a public program in Detroit that serves $5 dollar dinners, asks four people to give presentations on how they would better the city. At the end of the night, attendees vote on which presentation should get a grant. A recap of one such evening. [Michigan Daily]
Michael Kimmelman observes that community centers served us well during Hurricane Sandy, and thinks we should use some of the federal emergency money to build libraries. We’re not sure they’re used quite as much as community centers, but we’re happy with any proposal that keeps New York’s libraries in the public eye. [The New York Times]
Twitter’s not making money and they’re losing users. [Dealbook]
We’re thinking about making Gravity a required viewing for all AFC staff and recommend readers join us. This movie looks great. A.O. Scott has the review. [The New York Times]
“Abstract Expressionism is overrated,” begins Holland Cotter, in his review of Robert Motherwell’s early collage show at the Guggenheim. Um, no. Motherwell is overrated. Spend an hour in the Albright Knox, and you’ll remember why people care about Abstract Expressionism. Viewing the best of this movement is truly moving. Anyway, he explains that while much of Motherwell’s work was repetitive and predictable, these collages are not. -PJ [The New York Times]
And the reviews of the New Museum’s Chris Burden show begin. Roberta Smith loves it. [The New York Times]
The Alice Austen House opens a show of Melissa Cacciola’s tintype portraits this Sunday, titled “War and Peace.” Situated in a Victorian Gothic cottage on Staten Island called “Clear Comfort,” the museum was home to one of America’s earliest woman photographers. Deputy photo editor of TIME Magazine Paul Moakley is curator in residence, and the museum features sweeping views of lower Manhattan. Try and think of a better way to spend Sunday afternoon. [Alice Austen House]
Restoration Hardware, a shop that sells everything from salvaged-wood tables to funky drawer pulls is unveiling RH Contemporary Art, “a platform that includes an interactive Web site, which will blend e-commerce and editorial; a print journal; a series of short documentaries; a residency program; and, yes, a Manhattan gallery.” These are the guys that brought you The Rain Room, so set your expectations low. -PJ [T Magazine]
Thomas Jefferson has a call-in talk show. Okay, he’s actually an historian who likes to impersonate Thomas Jefferson. [The Thomas Jefferson Hour, h/t @gregorg]
Calling all sandwich artists! Katz’s Deli is opening up a pop-up gallery space to feature works by artists living in the heart of the LES. All the exhibitions will be “deli-inspired.” [Bowery Boogie]

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At the Whitney: Industry, Advertising, and Death Makes America Hard to See

by Paddy Johnson on April 27, 2015

A closer look at the Whitney’s permanent collection exhibition America Is Hard to See.

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A Quiet Opening Night for Art Toronto

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on October 25, 2013

The crowds were noticeably thinner at this year’s Art Toronto opening according to many attendees, though fair attendance numbers showed an slight increase (2100 last year, and 2200 this year). This perception may have to do with the fair’s downsize; roughly 11 percent (from 128 exhibitors last year to 114 this year, including three non-profit spaces). Last night, a section of the Metrocenter was closed off, and two rows of booths that might normally fill that space were absent.

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Friday Links: Inside the Pigment War

by Michael Anthony Farley on June 23, 2017

Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0 pigment accomplishes some of the optical trickery of Vantablack.

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know (or not) about the beef between British artists Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple over Kapoor’s exclusive rights to Vantablack. The story basically ends with Semple making his own ultra-black pigment that’s available for everyone and far more affordable. [Wired]
The Tate Britain has placed work from Khadija Saye on view in their memorial gallery. Saye died in the Grenfell Tower fire last week. [BuzzFeed]
Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery is expanding, following last year’s huge donation of $42.5 million from billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach. The plan, from OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, will allow the museum to display more of its collection while maintaining the Olmstead parkland in which it sits. They’ll accomplish this by expanding underground and burying the existing parking lot. [WIVB 4]
As skyrocketing rents make expansion in major art capitals impossible, many mid-tier galleries are opening locations in smaller cities or vacation towns. Or giving up permanent brick-and-mortar locations altogether and just doing pop-ups and art fairs. [Financial Times]
Head to the Oculus at the World Trade Center sometime in the next month. Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel features nearly-life-sized reproductions of the famous frescoes in great detail. [artnet News]
Stop plucking now: the Dallas Museum of Art is hoping to set a world record for most Frida Kahlo impersonators gathered in the same place. The event will take place on July 6th, what would have been the artist’s 110th birthday. [Star Telegram]
Some of the brains behind the Highline have created a website, Highline Network, to share ideas with other similar park projects. A lot of the impetus actually seems to be a cautionary tale—most don’t want to replicate the out-of-control gentrification that accompanied the park’s arrival. [Dezeen]

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Thursday Links: Handmaids on the Highline

by Michael Anthony Farley on April 27, 2017

The Handmaid’s Train

A post shared by Michael Martin (@martinized) on Apr 26, 2017 at 3:09pm PDT

Basically every review of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale says the same thing: it’s a masterful piece of streaming television and scary timely. I binge-watched the first three episodes yesterday. [The Internet]
If you haven’t read the book yet, head to the Highline, where an appropriately dystopian-looking installation contains thousands of free copies of the book. [Curbed]
It’s really hard to tell if Ivan Argote’s solo show at the new Galerie Perrotin sounds great or awfully cheesy. In one video, Argote interviews people born on exact opposite sides of the Earth on the day the Berlin Wall fell, demonstrating how small the popular conception of “history” can be. Another work is a giant golden sweet potato. Mostly, it seems like a lot of romantic text-based works. We’re going to have to see this one ourselves. [Forbes]
This is the art heist movie we’ve been waiting for. Gael García Bernal is set to star in a film about a real-life midnight robbery of a Mexico City museum in the 80s. [artnet News]
The Denver Art Museum will be the only U.S. institution to host the blockbuster exhibition Degas: A Passion for Perfection. [The Know]
Apparently it’s illegal for California art galleries to serve beer and wine at openings, and police in some cities have been cracking down. However, hair salons and barber shops can serve alcohol. What? A new bill, A.B. 629, is hoping to change this. Under the proposed law, gallerists wouldn’t need a liquor license to serve beer and wine. [Los Angeles Times]
Pop artist Marisol has bequeathed her entire estate to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Apparently the museum had been the first to acquire one of her works as an emerging artist. Now they’ve received the largest donation in the institution’s history. [The New York Times]
Alex Greenberger and Andrew Russeth have a handy infographic of what obscure art historical movements are trending and which have fizzled out. 1970s Chicago Imagism is apparently more relevant than 1990s-present(?) Stuckism. Who knew? [ARTnews]
Artist and Curator Blair Murphy discusses DC’s rampant gentrification, the loss of art spaces, and hope for the future. [BmoreArt]

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