GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIPS
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 78th annual fellowships to artists, scholars and scientists. Awards totaling $6,750,000 went to 184 recipients in 2002, for an average of over $36,680 each. Winners in the visual arts (and their cities of residence): Brett Baker (Ithaca, N.Y.), Dennis Congdon (Rehoboth, Mass.), Judith Eisler (New York), Alfredo Gisholt (Newton, Mass.), David Humphrey (New York), Chris Martin (Brooklyn), Rita McBride (New York), Marlene McCarty (New York), Santi Moix (New York), Judith Murray (New York), Jennifer Nuss (New York), Stephen Prina (Los Angeles), Alexander Ross (Alford, Mass.), Adrian Saxe (Los Angeles), Allyson Strafella (Brooklyn), Tomas Vu-Daniel (New York), Randy Wray (Brooklyn), Victoria Wulff (New York). Photography: Marion Belanger (Guilford, Conn.), Dawoud Bey (Chicago, Ill.), Elinor Carucci (New York), Mitch Epstein (New York), Kenro Izu (New York), Tanya Marcuse (Barrytown, N.Y.), Madoka Takagi (Topanga, Ca.). Film and video: Rebecca Baron (Valencia, Ca.), Elizabeth King (Richmond, Va.), Jim McKay (New York), Susan Mogul (Los Angeles), Pola Rapaport (Hampton Bays, N.Y.), Sheila M. Sofian (Pasadena, Ca.), Elisabeth Sufrin (Amherst, Mass.), Naomi Uman (Newhall, Ca.), Karen Yasinsky (Brooklyn). New Media Arts: Perry Hoberman (Brooklyn). Fine Arts research: Jonathan Hay (New York), Guy P.R. Metraux (Toronto), Jonathan Weinberg (Jersey City, N.J.), Christopher S. Wood (New Haven, Conn.).
YOUNG FEMINISTS GET ARTSY
A group of young artists and critics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have launched Artsy, an art magazine dedicated to art by women. "The art world is always happy to see naked women," write founders Jasmine Trabelsi, Julia Laricheva and Jenny Bachmen. "What it hates is to see them actually doing great work and succeeding at it." The current issue features a cover photograph by Sarah Kunstler, interviews with the Guerilla Girls and film director Souzan Alavi and writings on Sandra Bermudez, Diana Cooper, Katherine Kuharic, Jean Shin, Nancy Spero and others. The magazine is distributed via art galleries in the U.S. and Europe; magazine fans can contact Artsy at PO Box 413, Amherst, Mass. 01004.
RECORD PRICE FOR STRAND PHOTO
It's photo-auction week in New York, with Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg leading off the pack with its inaugural sale of modern photographs at its New York headquarters on Apr. 15, 2002. Top lot was a 1927 blue-black platinum print of a Mullein -- a weed -- by Paul Strand, which sold for a record $607,500. The photo carried a presale estimate of $250,000-$350,000; the previous Strand record was $335,750, set at Sotheby's in April 2000. The photo record is held by Gustave le Gray's ca. 1855 seascape, which sold for over $838,000 at Sotheby's London in 1999. A photo of a sneaker display by Andreas Gursky sold for over $611,000 at Sotheby's London in February 2002.
Photo auctions continue at the other New York houses for the rest of the week. In the meantime, Phillips has announced plans to move its spring auction of Impressionist art from New York to London, where it is scheduled for June 24 at Claridge's. Word is, however, that a slight legal entanglement is still to be cleared away -- the two-year "non-compete" clause LVMH signed with Bonham's back at the beginning of its auction adventure.
"ROMANCE" AT STUDIO MUSEUM
The Studio Museum in Harlem, fresh from its successful "Africaine" exhibition, next presents "Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art," Apr. 24-June 23, 2002. Organized by Thelma Golden, the show features black kitsch ("historicizing a vital art practice and function specific to African American history and culture") via 86 paintings and drawings by 36 artists living and working in the U.S. The artists are Alonzo Adams, Leroy Allen, Iana L.N. Amauba, Jules R. Arthur III, Alexander Austin, Marlon H. Banks, Nina I. Buxenbaum, Clifford Darrett, Keith J. Duncan, Lawrence Finney, Gerald Griffin, James Houston, Robert L. Jefferson, Oliver B. Johnson Jr., Troy L. Johnson, Jonathan Knight, Jeanette Madden, Cal Massey, Dean Mitchell, Kadir Nelson, Leslie Printis, Robert V. Reid, Jonathon Romain, Philip Smallwood, Aj Smith, Toni L. Taylor, Hulbert Waldroup, Larry Walker, Shamek Weddle, Kehinde Wiley.
GREUZE ON PAPER AT THE FRICK
Just in time for the breakdown of contemporary society, the great 18th-century moralist Jean-Baptiste Greuze is coming to New York City. "Greuze the Draftsman," a comprehensive survey of approximately 70 works on paper organized by Frick Collection curator emeritus Edgar Munhall, premieres at the Frick, May 14-Aug. 4, 2002. The drawings present "the real world in all of its varied manifestations," Munhall writes. "Children are recorded as real people, women offer their attractions boldly, men look up in terror, dogs bark." The show travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Sept. 10-Dec. 1, 2002, where it will be accompanied with a concurrent presentation of paintings by the artist.
MONO-CHROME BY BARBARA ROSE
Renowned critic and curator Barbara Rose, celebrated for attempting to reinvent painterly abstraction in a Neo-Ex, Po-Mo time with her 1985 "Fresh Paint" exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is now turning her attention to the monochrome. "Mono-Chrome," a show of works by five painters -- Gerardo Rueda, Fred Eversley, Joseph Marioni, Roberto Pietrosanti and Martin Kline -- opens at Paul Rodgers/9W on West 20th Street in Manhattan's Chelsea district, May 14-June 22, 2002. "The most radical statement available to contemporary art," writes Rose, "is that of a single color." The five artists are included in her comprehensive survey of monochrome painting, titled "The Varieties of Monochrome," planned to inaugurate the new wing designed by Jean Nouvel for the Reina Sofía Art Center in Madrid.
POUSETTE-DART ENDS TOUR IN BOCA RATON
The Boca Raton (Fla.) Museum of Art opens "Richard Pousette-Dart: The Living Edge, Works on Paper, 1937-1992," Apr. 17-June 15, 2002. The showing is the final stop in the tour of the groundbreaking retrospective, which brings together 132 works by the Abstract Expressionist painter in a show organized by the esteemed former Fogg Art Museum curator Konrad Oberhuber for the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in collaboration with the Pousette-Dart estate. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive 208-page catalogue in English and German that is priced at a bargain $17.95.
GAY ARTIST OUTS POLLOCK
Erotic artist Harold Stevenson (b. 1929), currently the subject of a mini-retrospective at the new Chelsea digs of Mitchell Algus Gallery, Apr. 13-May 25, 2002, outs famed Ab Ex avatar Jackson Pollock in an interview with Adrian Dannatt in the April issue of the Art Newspaper. Stevenson, famous for The New Adam, his room-sized 1962 painting of a nude Sal Mineo, says that he knew Pollock "in the biblical sense" and that the two of them would booze it up and "participate with one another" at Alfonso Ossorio's cottage in Springs, L.I. "I didn't mind going to bed with him," Stevenson says, "I just didn't want to paint like him." Pollock's sexuality was very much the subject of the massive 1989 Pollock bio by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which speculated that he was a repressed homosexual and suffered from impotence at the end of his life.
ANOTHER NEWSPAPER, MORE BAD ART CRITICISM
New York City has a new newspaper, the New York Sun, and its 18-page, 50-cent premiere issue -- featuring on its front page stories on the "largest ever ant colony" and the "crisis" of extending New York's rent-control laws -- includes, on page 15, an "art comment" column titled "The Worst Biennial Ever?" Penned by Daniel Kunitz, who writes regularly for the New Criterion, the 950-word report seems considerably longer, beginning with outrage over an overheard comment by a 16-year-old girl and ending with commonplaces about "cultivating the minds of children and adults." Kunitz burdens his airy pronouncements with no mention or description of actual artworks, a practice that puts him in the running for "worst New York art critic with a regular column in a newspaper or magazine," a race currently led by the New York Observer's Mario Naves.
On a brighter note, the Sun's calendar section includes mention of D-L Alvarez opening at Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea on Apr. 18, a listing of impeccable avant-garde credentials.
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