Dec. 8, 2005 

JURORS NAMED FOR NEW CLARK PRIZE
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., has announced the jurors for the new Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, a set of three $25,000 awards slated to be given out for the first time next April in New York. Jurors are Whitechapel Art Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden, Yale University art historian David Joselit, California Institute of the Arts president Steven Lavine and NYU professor Robert Storr. Following its first presentation, the Clark Prize -- which "celebrates excellence in arts writing that conveys complex ideas in a manner that is informed, insightful and accessible" -- is to be awarded biannually to a single winner.

NEW ART GLOSSY SET FOR 2006
March 2006 is the target publication date for Whitewall, an oversize new art quarterly on tap from publisher Michael Klug, a former software entrepreneur, and editor-in-chief Eve Therond, a freelance writer (and daughter of celebrated collector and Photo magazine founder Roger Therond). Designed as a "luxurious lifestyle magazine about art" with "no boring articles," Whitewall is debuting with a first issue projected to weigh in at a substantial 210 pages, including a studio visit with painter Kehinde Wiley and an interview with Aby Rosen titled "The Coollector." Printed in Barcelona on rich, semi-glossy stock, Whitewall is going after high-end consumer advertisers like Bulgari, Chanel and Maybach, and plans as well for ten pages of gallery ads. For details, see www.whitewallmag.com

COURBET LANDSCAPES AT THE GETTY CENTER
The landscapes of combative French realist Gustave Courbet go on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in "Courbet and the Modern Landscape," Feb. 21-May 14, 2006. Organized by Mary Morton and Charlotte Eyerman of the Getty and Dominique de Font-Réaulx at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the exhibition features 45 paintings made between 1855 and 1877. At the Getty, the show is complemented by a selection of 19th-century French photographs that resonate with Courbet’s works, and a selection of period cartoons lampooning the artist for his free-thinking reputation. After its appearance in Los Angeles, the exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 18-Sept. 10, 2006, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Oct. 15, 2006-Jan. 7, 2007.

WESLEY DOES BENEFIT PRINT
The Armory Show is publishing a pair of benefit prints by John Wesley to raise funds for the new Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation and the new Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Acquisition Fund at the Museum of Modern Art. Hearn and de Land, who were married, were two of the four founders of the Armory Show in 1994; Hearn died of cancer in 2000 and de Land died of the disease three years later. The two prints are Red Lips, a six-color screenprint, and Hootie’s Wife, a four-color screenprint; both are made in an edition of 45. The prepublication price for either print is $900; for details, see www.thearmoryshow.com

HUGO BOSS PRIZE SHORTLIST
The Guggenheim Museum has announced the shortlist for the next $50,000 Hugo Boss Prize, and like the Whitney Museum with its announcement last week of the artists in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim journeyed down to Florida during Art Basel Miami Beach to unveil its Boss finalists, throwing a gala at the deluxe Setai Hotel on Collins Avenue. Most of the finalists, who are surprisingly young -- some have hardly any exhibition record at all -- make work that is performance-based.

Perhaps best known are the kooky German performance artist John Bock and melancholy UK video poet Tacita Dean; others on the list are the hot young Puerto Rico-based duo of Jennifer Alora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Mexico’s Damián Ortega, known for a trilogy of works involving an anthropomorphized Volkswagen beetle, and Tino Sehgal, who conceived the happening in the German pavilion of 2005’s Venice Biennale in which guards conversed with visitors about free market economics; and finally, at least one wild-card candidate -- 2001 School of Visual Arts grad Aïda Ruilova, known for DVD installations with a Gothic-bohemian flair. (New Yorkers can get a look at Ruilova's Countdowns on the Astrovision Screen in Times Square, courtesy of Creative Time, Dec. 20, 2005-Mar. 6, 2006.)

The 2006 Hugo jurors are Jennifer Blessing, Lisa Dennison and Maria-Christina Villaseñor -- all of the Guggenheim -- Silvia Karman Cubiñá of Miami’s Moore Space, Massimiliano Gioni of Milan’s Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and Vicente Todoli of the Tate Modern in London. Winners are announced in fall 2006.

O’KEEFFE ON THE BLOCK AT FISK
Fisk University, the predominantly African American school in Nashville, Tenn., has announced plans to sell off the centerpiece of its art collection, Georgia O'Keeffe's Radiator Building -- Night, New York (1927), along with Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3 (1913). The paintings are part of the university’s Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art, donated to the Fisk in 1949 by O’Keeffe herself. Together, the two works are expected to fetch $16 million-$20 million, according to the Tennessean; the sale could set a new auction record for O’Keeffe (currently about $6.2 million). Proceeds are earmarked for endowment, the school’s business, science and mathematics departments and to enhance security for the remaining collection. Details of the actual sale are expected to be revealed within six months.

BUCKINGHAM HOTEL GIVES OUT MUSIC ART BUCKS
New York’s Buckingham Hotel has announced the winners of its second annual Buckingham Prize for the Expression of Music through Art, open to art school students for works that interpret the experience of music, and co-sponsored by the New York Studio School, the Art Students League and OOK Art and Picture Hanging Hardware. The winning painting is Modulations by Malado Baldwin of the Studio School, a diptych with abstract figures evoking musical tablature on a blue background. Baldwin took home a check for $7,000 and also receives a lifetime supply of picture hanging hooks from OOK. The painting joins the hotel's permanent collection, and is currently on display in the Buckingham's lobby art gallery.

NEW WING AT THE MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS
On June 11, 2006, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts unveils its $50-million, 113,000-square-foot renovation and expansion, designed by Michael Graves & Associates and featuring a three-story skylit rotunda, a reception hall seating 400 for dinner and 27 new galleries. Inaugurating the new wing, which is eventually to hold the MIA’s formidable collection of Asian art, is "The Surreal Calder," June 11-Sept. 10, 2006, currently on view at the Menil Collection in Houston.

LACMA DOES ETTORE SOTTSASS
An exhibition featuring nearly 100 objects by the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass is set to open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mar. 12-June 11, 2006. The show, organized by assistant curator of the decorative arts Ronald T. Labaco, brings together prototypes for furniture and office machine designs by the 88-year-old, Austrian-born designer, who is renowned for mixing references to ancient culture with modern technology.

NEW MURAL AT MIDDLEBURY

Artist Matt Mullican has installed a new mural at the new library building at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt. Titled L’Art d’Ecrire, the mural features 64 black-and-yellow panels with images from Mullican’s landscape of signs, based in part on Denis Diderot’s 18th-century Encyclopedia. Mullican’s work is the first new commission since 1978 by the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Fund for Mural Painting in America, and was selected from 70 proposals by representatives from the college, the Abbey foundation and the architectural firm in charge of the site, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates.

-- contact wrobinson @ artnet.com