WARHOL IN VEGAS
"Andy Warhol: The Celebrity Portraits," a collection of more than 50 paintings and works on paper, goes on view at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas, Feb. 7-Sept. 7, 2003. The show features an audio tour narrated by Liza Minnelli, and includes portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor (the 1960s), Mick Jagger and Mao Tse-Tung (the '70s), and Deborah Harry, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson (the '80s). The paintings are on loan from the Mugrabi Collection; the exhibition is organized by PaperBall, which was founded in 2001 by Marc Glimcher and Andrea Bundonis. Admission to the show is $15 for adults and $12 for students, seniors and residents of Nevada.
FORT WORTH MODERN OPENS
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opened its new $65-million, 153,000-square-foot concrete and glass building, designed by Tadao Ando, to the public on Dec. 14 with "10 Years: The Permanent Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth." The new facility, which adds 53,000 square feet of exhibition space to the 10,000 square feet in the existing building, is being favorably compared to Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum next door, widely considered one of the best buildings in the country. "It almost makes me want to cry," Marian McKeever Millican, a professor of interior design at UTA, told the Fort Worth Star Telegram. "I can't believe I'm living in a city with those two buildings juxtaposed."
TUNICK SELECTED MAN OF THE YEAR IN CHILE
Artist Spencer Tunick has been selected man of the year by the Chilean national newspaper La Tercera. In a special addition of the paper that focuses on the past year's trends and important events, Tunick's Nude Adrift, for which he photographed more than 4,000 naked people in a controversial performance work, is singled out as the most important event of the past year. The newspaper says that Tunick's work shocked Chilean society by creating a dialogue that touched upon issues of personal and political freedom, conservative social policies, national identity and past political oppression. Tunick was presenting work in Chile in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of selections from the 25th São Paulo Bienal and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile.
"HERE IS NEW YORK" IN PRINT
"Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," the spontaneous collection of images of 9/11 and its aftermath that heartened and touched people in New York and cities across the country, has now been published in book form. The 864-page tome, Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs (Scalo), includes nearly 1,000 of the more than 5,000 pictures submitted by amateurs and professionals. The book is $49.95 and can be ordered online at www.scalo.com; proceeds from the sale go to the Children's Aid Society WTC Relief Fund and other charities. The images are also viewable online at http://hereisnewyork.org/.
A NEW WAY OF COLLECTING
The fruits of a new model of art collecting go on view at the Seattle Art Museum, as "ContemporaryArtProject" opens Dec. 20, 2002-Apr. 6, 2003. The collection was formed after former Seattle dealer Linda Farris assembled a group of 16 Seattle-based art patrons into an art collecting collaborative that bought new art, displayed it in their homes and then donated the lot to the Seattle Art Museum. On view here is a selection of works dating after 1995, including many made by women and dealing with psychosexual themes, adolescence and new feminism. Among the artists in the collection are Cecily Brown, Inka Essenhigh, Lisa Yuskavage and Justine Kurland. A 70-page catalogue with an essay by SAM curator Tara Young accompanies the exhibition.
ART PROJECT "BOMBS" IN NEW YORK Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old art student at the School of the Visual Arts in New York, was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment for placing 37 spray-painted black shirt boxes stenciled with the word "fear" around the Union Square subway station on Dec. 11. Alarmed police shut down the station and called the bomb squad, and suggested the prank may have been the work of the transit union, then in negotiations over a new contract. Boisert, who could face as much as a year in jail under the misdemeanor charge, was reportedly fulfilling an assignment in sculpture class that required him to make art in a public place.
MANIFESTA TO BASQUE REGION
The fifth installment of Manifesta, the peripatetic show of new art, is taking the exposition into troubled waters for summer 2004 -- Manifesta 5 is slated to be held in Donostia-San Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. Curators for the show -- who are to live and work in region during preparation of the show -- are art critic and Venice Biennale curatorial team-member Massimiliano Gioni; independent curator and former artistic director of the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Marta Kuzma; and Paula Toppila, curator at the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange in Helsinki. Local arts institutions supporting the project are Arteleku and the Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporanea (CICC); for more info see www.manifesta.org.
PISSARRO TO INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM
The Indianapolis Museum of Art has acquired Camille Pissarro's The House of the Deaf Woman and the Belfry at Eragny (1886) for an undisclosed sum from an anonymous European collection. The painting, one of Pissarro's largest Neo-Impressionist works, was last seen in public in 1918; it went on view at the museum on Dec. 3. "We can indisputably say that this acquisition makes Indianapolis the site of the greatest collection of Neo-Impressionist works in the nation," said IMA director Anthony Hirschel. The IMA received the W.J. Holliday collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings as a bequest in 1979 and has added to it works by Lucien Pissarro, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Willy Finch and Jan Toorop since 1995.
LOOK AHEAD TO THE LYON BIENNALE
Though the Lyon Biennale is almost a year away -- it's scheduled to open in late September 2003 -- some details about the shape of the show have already been announced. The biennale is set for a new venue, the Sucrière, and four additional sites: Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Villeurbanne Institute of Contemporary Art, Lyon Fine Arts Museum and the Lyon Rectangle. Organized by Thierry Raspail and Thierry Prat since 1991, the 2003 installment is being done in collaboration with the Consortium, the Dijon contemporary art center. Consortium directors Xavier Douroux, Franck Gautherot and Eric Troncy have in turn invited three freelance curators: Anne Pontégnie from Brussels, Jan Winkelmann from Leipzig and Robert Nickas from New York. For more info see www.biennale-de-lyon.org.
DUTCH MUSEUM TO REOPEN
The newly renovated Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, opens to the public on Jan. 17, 2003. The new addition, a gray slate-covered structure designed by Dutch architect Abel Cahen and located on the Dommel River, gives the museum three times its original exhibition space, plus an updated restaurant, auditorium, library and bookstore. The first exhibition, "About We," will display prominent works from the museum's collection.
NEW NET ART
Two new web-art projects have recently gone online. Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) presents Errata Erratum at the Museum of Contemporary Art's website till Feb. 6, 2003. The piece allows web cruisers to manipulate shapes from Marcel Duchamp's famed rotoreliefs along with Miller's own disc-shaped tags.
Meanwhile, over at the Art Production Fund's website is Changing Space by Fatimah Tuggar, which lets viewers change backgrounds on the web page and insert moving images of things like a disco dancer, a goat and a singing Eiffel tower. The Tuggar piece is the third installation of the arts management firm's online series "In Space."
NEW MUSEUM TO THE BOWERY
The New Museum of Contemporary Art is moving to a site on the Bowery, just a few feet north of the city's famous homeless mission district and a few blocks south of the punk-rock nightclub CBGBs. The new $35-million, 60,000-square-foot structure, to be located on the site of a parking lot at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, will be twice the size of the current facility. The design competition begins soon, says museum board president Saul Dennison, with completion of new building set for late 2005.
MILLER/GEISLER GALLERY OPENS IN NEW YORK
A new stop on the Chelsea art tour is the Miller/Geisler Gallery, located on the third floor of the gallery building at 511 West 25th Street. The 4,600-square-foot gallery, opened by independent curator Mara Miller and former bond trader Peter Geisler, currently features photographs of the Scottish highlands by Michele Lazenby and two series of photographs by Lucy Levene, one of London nightclub life and the second of interfaith marriages (both to Jan. 18, 2003). Other artists exhibiting with the gallery are Ed Fraga, Vaughan Judge, Keith Morrison, Elizabeth Obermayer, Jennifer Odem and Elene Tremblay.
HAWLEY RETIRES Henry H. Hawley, the longtime curator of Baroque and later decorative arts and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum, has retired. His most recent exhibitions include "Faberge in America" (1997), "Glass Today: American Studio Glass from Cleveland Collections" (1998) and "Bugatti" (1999). The 2003 issue of the museum's annual journal, Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, is devoted to a festschrift celebrating Hawley's career at the museum, which began in 1960.
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