GENIUS GRANTS TO HICKEY, INIGO-MANGLANO-OVALLE
The John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation in Chicago has named 23 winners of the munificent MacArthur Fellowships, sometimes known as "genius grants." For the 2001 round, each recipient receives $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached. Art-world grantees are Las Vegas critic and curator Dave Hickey, artist and Chicago university professor Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and David Wilson, founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. "This new group of fellows is a strong collection of extraordinarily creative individuals, exceptional minds in motion," said Daniel Socolow, who runs the award program. "We hope the fellowships will provide new freedom and opportunity over an extended period of time in support of these fellows' demonstrated potential for still greater achievement." For more info -- including photos of the fellows -- click here.
CASINO 2001
Get ready for Casino 2001, a new "quadrennial" that takes gambling as a metaphor for contemporary art, opening in Gent, Belgium, Oct. 27, 2001-Jan. 13, 2002. Located at European supercurator Jan Hoet's Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and the neighboring historical municipal Bijloke Museum, the show features work by 60 artists in "a sort of turntable, an event that will ensure that the museum continually questions its own function." Curator is Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, director of Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York. The show's theme -- S.M.A.K. is a former gambling casino -- takes the gambling palace as the "paradigmatic site of the spectacular" -- "extravagant and theatrical, fortune-making and breaking," a "glittering surface reality" with "a darker underbelly -- addictive, seedy, corrupt and violent."
Among the headliners are New York artist Keith Edmier in collaboration with Charlie's AngelFarrah Fawcett. Other participants include Franz Ackermann (Germany), Haluk Akakçe (Turkey), Ricci Albenda (U.S.), Darren Almond (England), Emmanuelle Antille (Switzerland), Mike Bouchet (U.S.), Andrea Bowers (U.S.), Slater Bradley (U.S.), Juan Céspedes (Chile), Patty Chang (U.S.), Minerva Cuevas (Mexico), Jason Dodge (U.S.), Ben Edwards (U.S.), Jeroen Eisinga (Netherlands), Inka Essenhigh (U.S.), Angus Fairhurst (England), Tom Friedman (U.S.), Gajin Fujita (U.S.), Kendell Geers (South Africa), Katy Grannan (U.S.), Katharina Grosse (Germany), Nic Hess (Switzerland), Michelle Hines (U.S.), Nortoshi Hirakawa & Didier Théron (Japan), Jonathan Horowitz (U.S.), Cameron Jamie (U.S.), Ann Veronica Janssens (Belgium), Mika Kato (Japan), Kurt Kauper (U.S.), Andree Korpys & Markus Löffler (Germany), Michael Lin (Taiwan), Michel Majerus (Germany), Margherita Manzelli (Italy), Malerie Marder (U.S.), Maria Marshall (England), Julie Mehretu (U.S.), Lucas Michael (Argentina/U.S.), Sarah Morris (U.S.), Victoria Morton (Scotland), David Musgrave (England), Mie Nagai (Japan), Csaba Nemes & Ágnes Szépfalvi (Hungary), Olaf Nicolai (Germany), Tim Noble & Sue Webster (England), Richard Patterson (England), Alix Pearlstein (U.S.), Paul Pfeiffer (U.S.), Jeroen de Rijke & Willem de Rooij (Netherlands), Hannelore Reuen (Germany), Gert Robijns (Belgium), Peter Rostovsky (Russia/U.S.), Aïda Ruilova (United States), Ricky Swallow (Australia), Patrick Tuttofuoco (Italy), Piotr Uklanski (Poland), Minnette Vári (South Africa), Gary Webb (England), Saskia Olde Wölbers (Netherlands), Sislej Xhafa (Kosovo).
The Bijloke Museum, a former abbey whose buildings date from the 14th century and include a hospital, is to be a kind of "waxworks" or "funhouse... where artists give free rein to their imagination and where the visitor experiences a feeling of disorientation." For more info: smakcasino2001@aol.com and www.quadriennale.be.
NUDE TO NAKED AT C&M
The show to see in uptown Manhattan is "Naked Since 1950" at C&M Arts, Oct. 11-Dec. 8, 2001, an exhibition of some 40 works organized by the gallery's two principals Robert Mnuchin and Jennifer Vorbach, with its director of exhibitions, Robert Pincus-Witten. "What the nude once forbade, the naked now parades," Pincus-Witten writes in the hardcover catalogue accompanying the show. "It is clear that from the mid-20th-century on, the trajectory of human depiction has moved from the formal to the political." The selection ranges from Dubuffet, Giacometti and Picasso to Ron Mueck, Charles Ray and Lisa Yuskavage, and includes Edward Hopper's A Woman in the Sun (1961) on loan from the Whitney Museum and John Currin's The Pink Tree (1999) lent by the Hirshhorn Museum (most of the works in the exhibition are on loan). Other "downtown" artists welcomed into the uptown venue are Larry Clark, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Jeff Koons, Jenny Saville, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith. Conceptualists are certain to favor Bruce Nauman's 1966 watercolor, Glass template of the left half of my body separated by cans of grease, while devotees of Fluxus will enjoy Yoko Ono's Film No. 4 (Bottoms), also done in 1966. For more info, check the website at www.c-m-arts.com.
ART FAIR FOR TEXAS
Has the art market gone to Texas? Find out at the second annual Texas International Art Fair in Dallas, Tx., Nov. 2-7, 2001. Art-fair entrepreneurs David and Lee Ann Lester's tent goes up at NorthPark East near downtown, with 75 dealers from eight countries, ranging from Adrian Alan (London) and Lily Beer (Buenos Aires) to Victorian Gallery (Dallas) and Wartenbergh & Blanken (Savannah), and including leading London dealers Marks Fine Art and Goedhuis Contemporary, too. The gala preview on Nov. 1 benefits the Dallas Museum of Art; tickets are $150 and $250 per person; contact (214) 661-1713 for more info.
PLENSA, KAPOOR FOR CHICAGO PARK
A pair of 50-foot-tall glass towers of cascading water, incorporating screens for video projections of faces of Chicagoans, is the latest design for Chicago's new Millennium Park, the 24-acre lakefront greensward by the Art Institute of Chicago. The twin towers are the work of Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, a 45-year-old, Barcelona-based artist who shows with the Richard Gray Gallery, and represent his first major public work in the U.S. Other commissions for the park include a band shell by Frank O. Gehry and a huge, polished stainless steel abstraction by British artist Anish Kapoor, also the artist's first major U.S. public commission. The art works are to be privately commissioned; groundbreaking for Plensa's fountain is expected sometime next year.
TRADE CENTER DESIGN PROPOSALS
The Max Protetch gallery in New York's Chelsea art district, along with the staffs of Architecture and Architectural Record, have curated an exhibition of design proposals for a new World Trade Center, Jan. 16-Feb. 17, 2002. Participants include Hans Hollein, Richard Rogers and others.
CONSERVATION CENTER IN ATLANTA
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta has established the Atlanta Art Conservation Center (AACC), a 7,000-square-foot facility that is being run in collaboration with the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, Mass. The first major conservation center in the southeast U.S., the AACC can house 12 conservators in the former commercial building, converted this year to include conservation labs, offices, storage and a photo studio.
ONE WEEK TO APPLY FOR GETTY GRANTS 2002!
The Getty Grant Program in Los Angeles has announced awards totaling $2 million to hard-working art historians for the 2001-02 school year. Fifteen scholars from the U.S. and abroad receive $40,000 postdoctoral fellowships. Eight museum curators take a total of more than $100,000 to work on forthcoming shows. And seven teams of scholars get a total of $1.4 million for collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects, like "Bamum Art Worlds: Integration and Innovation in the grasslands of Cameroon from 1700 to the Present" (10 scholars from four countries split $211,600). The application deadline for the next round of Getty research grants is Nov. 1, 2001; applications are available online.
PARDO GUEST HOUSE
The art world's favorite interior designer, artist Jorge Pardo, has completed a new guest "sculpture-house" at Krabbesholm Højskole in Skive, Denmark, for visitors and artists in residence at the Danish art school. For more info, contact post@krabbesholm.dk.
HOWARD FINSTER, 1916-2001 Howard Finster, 84, evangelical Baptist and folk artist, died at a hospital in Rome, Ga., on Oct. 23, 2001. He lived in Summerville, Ga., not far from Paradise Garden, the famous two-and-one-half-acre folk-art environment he built since the 1960s in Pennville, Ga. He had his first gallery exhibition in 1979 at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago. In 1995 the High Museum in Atlanta opened "Birthday Party at the High Museum."
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