AUCTION HOUSES SHUFFLE SCHEDULES
In the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy, the New York
City art auctioneers have moved to reschedule their fall sales. The first auction to be affected by the World Trade Center attack was a large sale of prints at Christie’s East slated for Sept. 12; it has been rescheduled for Oct. 30 at the main facility in Rockefeller Center, in conjunction with
other contemporary and modern sales. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have rescheduled "Asia Week," a series of Asian art sales initially scheduled for Sept. 19-21, for October 15-17. Other sales of decorative arts and furniture are also postponed.
ART FAIRS CANCELED, RESCHEDULED
Many art events, including art fairs, have been canceled out
of respect for victims and the rescue effort, as well as new difficulties involving travel plans. The San Francisco International Art Exposition, initially scheduled for Sept. 21-24, has been postponed until Jan. 18-21, 2002. In New York, the art fairs scheduled for either of two Manhattan armories, one at Lexington and 26th Street and the other at Park Avenue and 67th Street, had to change plans after the National Guard took control of all New York armories for official use. The Wendy’s Antiques Show slated for the downtown armory in New York, Sept. 19-23, 2001, was cancelled, as was the International Art and Design Fair, 1900-2001, that was slated to open uptown on Sept. 29. At present, Brian and Anna Haughton’s International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, Oct. 19-25, is still scheduled to proceed as planned.
LMCC LOSES TRADE CENTER OFFICES
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, which programmed cultural events for the World Trade Center plaza and operated
a studio program for young artists on the 92nd floor of the north tower, saw its offices in 5 World Trade Center -- which held archives of more than two decades of operation -- destroyed by the events of Sept. 11. LMCC executive director Liz Thompson, studio-program director Moukhtar Kocache
and the rest of the staff escaped unharmed. Kathy Brew, who ran the five-year-old Thundergulch video program out of the LMCC offices, said that the organization was looking for temporary quarters in the neighborhood.
WTC ART COLLECTION PUT AT $10 MILLION
According to a report by Peter Marks and Carol
Vogel in the New York Times, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had an art collection valued at $10 million on view in the public and private spaces in the World Trade Center. Among the larger public works lost in the destruction are a 25-foot-tall Alexander Calder
stabile at 7 World Trade Center, a Louise Nevelson wood relief in the mezzanine of 1 World Trade Center and a Joan Miro tapestry in 2 World Trade Center. The Port Authority collection is chronicled in a hard-to-find book titled Art for the Public: The Collection of the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey. Many of the businesses that had offices in the WTC also had corporate art collections, whose contents have not yet been tallied.
"SOUNDS OF SOLACE" AT MET
The Metropolitan Museum has launched a brief series of noontime concerts, Sept. 14-23, dubbed "Sounds of Solace: Music for Reflection, Inspiration, and Hope" in the museum’s Medieval Hall. Also on tap is a series of poetry readings, titled "Poetry for the Human Spirit," held in the Engelhard Court in the American Wing at 2 p.m., daily through Sept. 23.
LOUVRE POSTPONES AFGHAN ART SYMPOSIUM
Security concerns have prompted the Louvre Museum in
Paris to postpone events scheduled for Sept. 15 and 17 dealing with Afghanistan's artistic heritage, according to Agence France-Presse. On Monday the museum had planned to show several films on Afghan art, including footage of the colossal Buddha statues destroyed earlier this year by the Taliban. On
Wednesday some 200 people were expected to attend a symposium of several Afghan art experts.
NEW NEA BOSS NOMINATED Michael P. Hammond, dean of the music school at Rice
University in Houston, has been named by President George W. Bush to head the National Endowment for the Arts. The 69-year-old conductor and composer was a founding dean of music at the new arts campus at SUNY Purchase, and also founded the Pepsico Summerfare arts festival there. A Rhodes scholar,
he has conducted under Leopold Stokowski at the American Symphony, been conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic and composer in residence for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. He was also founding rector of the Prague Mozart Academy, and is a specialist in the music of Southeast Asia as well as the
Middle Ages and Renaissance.
MICHAEL RICHARDS, 1963-2001 Michael Richards, 38, New York sculptor whose
sculpture and drawings often took up the theme of the World War II Tuskegee Airman, was killed at his studio on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center when it was destroyed on Sept. 11. Born in Jamaica, Richards was at artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1966 and showed his work
there in "Passages" in 1999.
STUART SHERMAN, 1946-2001 Stuart Sherman, 55, Manhattan-based performance artist and filmmaker, died of AIDS in San Francisco on Sept. 14, 2001. Sherman gained art-world fame in the 1970s for brief performances using small props, often carried on stage in a suitcase. He crafted plays devoted to Checkhov, Brecht and Faust, and performed around the world, winning grants and an Obie award.
ARTNET.COM BACK AFTER 10-DAY OUTAGE Artnet.com went back online on Sept. 21, 2001, after
a 10-day outage that followed the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. The Artnet.com offices are located at 61 Broadway opposite Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks south of the World Trade Center site. The 25-story office building was undamaged in the attack, though electricity, water and
phone lines were cut off. Our employees are well and we thank all our friends for their expressions of concern and support. As business gradually resumes in Lower Manhattan, we at Artnet.com are working to put the auction databases, gallery network and magazine back into operation and meet the needs of our
users.
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