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Joan Semmel

Beyond Chelsea And The Lower East Side: The West Village Gallery Round-Up Part 2

by Emily Colucci on September 23, 2016

Continuing my exploration of the West Village galleries’ September shows, I ventured above Houston Street to Maccarone and White Columns.

Vanessa Beecroft Kanye

The Brooklyn Museum has named David Berliner president and chief operating officer. Given the museum’s PR problem with accusations of being pro-developer (and by extension, pro-gentrification) this is an odd choice. Berliner served previously as the chief operating officer of Forest City Ratner Companies, the developers who controversially created Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park using eminent domain to displace residents. [ARTnews]

Wow. Kanye West and Vanessa Beecroft can’t seem to stop doing controversial/dumb things. For their latest collaboration, they left models (“multi-racial women only”) standing for hours in the blistering sun on Roosevelt Island for so long that several women fainted and audience members (not production crew) felt so bad that they brought them bottles of water. Why? According to Beecroft, “The long wait before, I believe it was planned because [West] wanted the audience to get into this state of having to observe and having to stay.” [artnet News]

As New York rents skyrocket, in conjunction with higher labor and food costs, the city is hemorrhaging restaurants. Chefs are instead heading to midwestern cities to open places that can afford a “neighborhood” feel or culinary risk-taking. Meanwhile, landlords are ending up with vacant retail space or some combination of banks and Duane Reade locations. [Food Republic]

This post’s title-“Time to Let People Decide if 9/11 Sculpture is Art or Exploitation”-is pure click bait but the post isn’t. Reading through the article we watch the writer cite her own past criticisms of Eric Fischl’s sculpture back in 2002, Eric Fischl’s response years later and her reassessment of her position now. It’s rare to see that kind of bravery in writers. [The New York Post]

In other WTC news, a design has at last been chosen for the complex’s performing arts center. The winning proposal comes from Brooklyn-based firm REX, headed by former OMA architect Joshua Prince-Ramus (who spearheaded the famed Seattle Central Library alongside Rem Koolhaas). It’s a translucent marble box that slightly recalls OMA’s Casa da Musica, or perhaps I.M. Pei’s East Gallery. Those buildings are successful because they feel sturdy, timeless, and permanent yet lightweight and welcoming (as opposed to the 1 World Trade Center tower) and the performing arts center looks to hit those same notes. [Curbed]

It only took three weeks for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Councilman Jimmy Van Bremer to sit down for the meeting de Blasio promised in their latest skirmish over affordable housing, but it happened. Van Bremer has not backed down on his position that the so-called affordable housing at Phipps House slated for Queens is not a good idea. Now, a coalition of nearly a dozen community and arts organizations (Art F City included) will hold a summit on Sunday, Sept. 18, to discuss the Phipps Houses plan, the overdevelopment of western Queens and the SBJSA. [Times Ledger]

Not so sure about the photos on this site, but what the hell: YaPhoto is a new photography platform that’s launched in Cameroon with the mission of promoting an emerging community of Cameroonian photographers. [YaPhoto]

Art Basel has announced Buenos Aires as its first partner in the vaguely-defined Art Basel Cities Initiative. This is intended to “develop a program of cultural events designed to celebrate the city’s vibrant arts scene and raise its profile in the international art world as part of its economic development.” [Miami Herald]

We’ve never heard Joan Semmel’s theory that feminism comes into fashion when the market is down, because women’s art is less expensive. We’re not sure how this theory follows the rules of supply and demand. Art market experts, is this true? Anyway, an interview with painter and feminist Joan Semmel. [Hyperallergic]

Gustave Courbet, “Woman with a Cat,” 1864. Now on view at the Worcester Art Museum.

Somehow we missed this in our guide to D.F. events, but Yoko Ono has an exhibition that opens today at the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia: Mexico, Tierra de Esperanza (Land of Hope). It’s not too far from the art fairs, so if you’re in town, check it out! (Link is in Spanish) [El Universal]

Stylist Ursula Goff does hair inspired by art history—from acerbic and wavy in tribute to Edvard Munch to flat-blue and big like a Lichtenstein woman. [Mashable]

The Worcester Art Museum summer exhibition, Meow, promises an exploration of the feline as an art inspiration, pulling cat-related works from their collection. The show also will include a self-guided “cat walk” through the Museum and a “Cats-In-Residence” programme promising an “unorthodox” human/cat installation. I love cats, but I think I agree with Tyler Green’s assessment on this: “hard to imagine how this isn’t a substantial, mindless pander.” [Worcester Art Museum via @TylerGreenDC]

LACMA’s long, strange trip to acquire a 1940s zoot suit for its upcoming historical survey on men’s fashion. [Los Angeles Times]

Dallas Contemporary has a new exhibition Black Sheep Feminism that features the work of Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins and Cosey Fanni Tutti—artists who embraced t”he “pornographic” at the height of anti-sex second-wave feminism. From Sarah Galo: “Perhaps the greatest testament of Black Sheep Feminism’s power is that the outrage is irrelevant now for young feminists; sex positivity is the order of the day.” [The Guardian]

Related: June Mattingly, one of Dallas’s great supporters of art, has died. The former gallerist promoted the work of Texan artists, as well as started the Dallas Art Dealers Association and was a founding member of the Emergency Artists’ Support League. [Dallas Observer]

Belinda Lanks thinks we should all accept the new, “meh” Penn Station plans because “we don’t care about poetry when we’re stuck on an Acela arriving from Washington and train traffic is preventing us from making a meeting in Midtown.” To which I say: speak for yourself. [Bloomberg]