July 20, 2006 

NEW "MUSEUMS FOR AMERICA" GRANTS
The federal agency that provides general operating support for the country's museums and libraries, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences in Washington, D.C., has announced its "Museums for America" grants for 2006, a total of $16,955,577 allocated to 177 institutions. What does it all mean? For one thing, it means that the largest federal program helping to fund museums in the U.S. gives out a sum equal to approximately 13 percent of what one private patron, Ronald Lauder, reportedly spent on a single picture -- Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907).

In any case, just who are this year's "Museums for America?" A motley crew, to be sure, whose grants include:

* $150,000 for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York for the "Online Collection Database Project," which puts the museum holdings of 2,035 artworks, studio crafts, decorative arts and design objects on the web, in what is the centerpiece of the institution's new Center for the Study of Arts and Design.

* $150,000 for the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wa., for an interdisciplinary program that uses glass as an educational medium to teach math and science to middle school and high school students.

* $150,000 for the Queens Museum of Art for public art works and community celebrations in Queens' Corona Plaza

* $149,701 to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo to start a two-year project to update and put online records of its 6,000 piece collection of modern and contemporary art.

* $149,688 for the Detroit Institute of Arts to try and attract and train more volunteers.

* $147,234 for Houston's Blaffer Gallery for "Art Focus," an education program for adults and young people.

* $145,529 for the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pa., to expand the opportunities for community members to interact with the artists in residency at the innovative contemporary art center.

* $144,000 for the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, Ca., to create programs that target potential future donors among Silicon Valley youth and attract them to contemporary art.

* $123,225 for the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for youth-targeted educational programming designed to make an upcoming exhibition, "Ancient Interfaces: Connecting to the Past," relevant to the present.

* $97,411 for the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., for an educational program that draws links between works from the permanent collection and social studies, language arts and math.

* $67,990 for the Minneapolis Institute of Art to digitize and create a web database of its collection of Miao textiles.

* $64,594 for the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, to launch the New Orleans Center for Art and Technology (NOCAT), a job retraining center for low-income teens and underemployed adults, as well as to provide space and support for other arts organizations displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

* $63,320 for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., to help the institution "gain physical and intellectual control over records that have been dispersed throughout the museum for half a century."

* $15,323 for the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico to create curriculum, activity guides and 10 podcasts for the traveling show "Puerto Rico in the Artistic Imagination (1785-1948)."

ARTISTS FOR SCULPTURE MÜNSTER 2007
A year from now Europe explodes with contemporary art, with three major international expositions on the slate -- the 2007 Venice Biennale, Documenta 12 in Kassel and Sculpture Projects Münster 07, the every-ten-years exhibition of works by several dozen international artists at various public sites throughout the German city. Opening June 16-Sept. 20, 2006, Sculpture Projects Münster 07 is organized by Kaspar König, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Brigitte Franzen of the Westphalian State Museum in Münster, in association with Carina Plath of the Westphalian Art Association in Münster.

About 25 of the 35 artists have already been selected for the do: Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Michael Asher, Guy Ben-Ner, Guillaume Bijl, Martin Boyce, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, David Hammons, Mike Kelley, Marko Lehanka, Eva Meye and Eran Schaerf, Deimantas Narkevicius, Bruce Nauman, Manfred Pernice, Susan Philipsz, Martha Rosler, Thomas Schutte, Andreas Siekmann, Rosemarie Trockel, Silke Wagner, Mark Wallinger and Annette Wehrmann. For further details, see www.skulptur-projekte.de.

RODIN LIVES IN LONDON
Though Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is dead, his art lives on, notably through a selling exhibition of his bronzes being held this fall at London's Coskun gallery, Sept. 15-Dec. 15, 2006. Mounted in association with the Musée Rodin in Paris and coinciding with the major retrospective exhibition "Rodin" at the Royal Academy in London, Sept. 23, 2006-Jan. 1, 2007, the show at Coskun features posthumous casts of 60 key works, many offered for sale in the UK for the first time.

Prices range from £15,000 to £500,000, and include £125,000 for a dark patinaed 26-cm.-tall The Kiss, £95,000 for a ca. 55-inch-tall Tête de Saint Jean Baptiste and £225,000 for an Etude pour le monument à Victor Hugo. Gallery director Gul Coskun has represented the Musée Rodin in the UK for the last six years "in an effort to keep the Rodin legacy alive in Britain, as the artist wished." The show takes place at Coskun's new galleries at 91 Walton Street in London.

FLOW IN MIAMI
Eight art fairs in Miami in December are not enough, you say [see "Artnet News," June 14, 2006]? Then add one more -- the new Flow Miami Invitational Art Fair, Dec. 6-10, 2006, "dedicated to an environment where one can experience the purity of art." Held at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club at 1756 Collins Avenue in South Beach -- rather, in the Catalina annex known as the "spylounge" (the Bridge Art Fair is in the Catalina proper) -- Flow features 18 exhibitors from all over the U.S. The fair is directed by Matthew Garson.

Participants are Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans), Catherine Edelman Gallery (Chicago), Claire Oliver Gallery (new York), David Lusk (Memphis), J G Contemporary (New York), Julie Baker Fine Art (Nevada City, Ca.), Kenise Barnes Fine Art (Larchmont, N.Y.), Linda Durham Contemporary (Santa Fe), McKenzie Fine Art (New York), Miller Block Gallery (Boston), Morgan Lehman Gallery (Lakeville, Conn.), M% (Cleveland), PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, Ore.), Roy Boyd Gallery (Chicago), Rudolph Projects/ArtScan (Houston), Schmidt Dean Gallery (Philadelphia), Toomey Tourell Gallery (San Francisco) and Wildwood Press (St. Louis).

MARDEN RETRO ON TAP FOR FALL
"Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings" is coming to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Oct. 29, 2006-Jan. 15, 2007. Organized by former MoMA drawings curator Gary Garrels, now curator of the Hammer Museum in L.A., the show is the most complete retrospective yet of work by the 68-year-old artist, with over 50 paintings from the course of his entire career, including two new works exhibited for the first time in the show. The exhibition subsequently appears at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 17, 2007-May 13, 2007, and the Hamburger Bahnhof -- Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin.

CARIBBEAN CULTURE AT EL MUSEO
New York's El Museo del Barrio is planning a major exhibition devoted to Caribbean culture in 2009. Titled "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," the show is being organized in collaboration with the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. (The America's Society is also planning a related exhibition for the same time.) The show includes both indigenous and hybrid cultural and visual expressions, and is organized around themes of modernity, independence and identity, and the contemporary. Stay tuned. 

25 MORE BOLD MOVES, IN L.A.
Campari, the exotic red Italian liqueur that mixes so well with vodka and soda, is sponsoring its latest House of Campari series of culture events in Los Angeles for the summer. Titled "25 Bold Moves," July 14-Aug. 13, 2006, the exhibition is organized by Simon Watson and Craig Hensala and located at 1224 Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach, Ca. The curators have selected 25 artists, supposedly representing the best of emerging art in L.A.: Jimmy Baker, John White Cerasulo, Allison Cortson, Aaron Curry, Ian Davis, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, Jim Drain, Zackary Drucker, Frohawk Two Feathers, Kati Heck, Gustavo Herrera, Håvard Homstvedt, Matt Johnson, Ulrich Lamsfuss, Karen Liebowitz, Nathan Mabry, Allison Miller, Carter Mull, Ruben Ochoa, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Leslie Shows, Mark Verabioff, Mario Ybarra Jr., Spencer Young and Brenna Youngblood.

HOLSTAD SOLO AT MOCA MIAMI
New York artist Christian Holstad is receiving his first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. "Christian Holstad: The Terms of Endearment," Sept. 9-Nov. 5, 2006, features a new large-scale installation combining drawings, soft sculptures and a transformed jukebox at the museum's annex, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse in Miami's Wynwood Arts District. The exhibition is organized by MoCA director Bonnie Clearwater.

BONVICINI AT ORGANIZED LIVING
Monica Bonvicini, the Berlin-based artist whose architectural installations often can pack an S&M punch, comes to Los Angeles to install the site-specific Not for You, July 26-Oct. 1, 2006, as part of Milan dealer Emi Fontana's "West of Rome" series. The site is a former Organized Living container store at at 345 South Lake Ave. in Pasadena, Ca. Bonvicini's project is the second installment in "West of Rome." The first was Olafur Eliasson's installation in the hill-side Jamie House in Los Angeles [see "Interior Weather," May 18, 2005]. For more info, see www.westofromeinc.com.

DOWNSIZING AT PHYLLIS KIND
After 30 years in SoHo, Phyllis Kind Gallery is moving to an as-yet-unspecified location in Chelsea (if all goes according to plan). In the meantime, the gallery is holding a "call it a clearance" sale of "outsider art" at its 136 Greene Street location through July 23, 2006. Prices start at $150 for a hand-painted birdhouse from 1991 (the first Gulf War) by the late Howard Finster. "All reasonable offers considered."

NEW GALLERY IN VENICE
Art collector and landscape designer Sean Knibb is opening his own gallery in Venice, Cal. Dubbed 1522 after its address -- 1522 Abbott Kinney Blvd. -- the 1,300-square-foot space debuts on July 22, 2006, with an exhibition of works by Kevin Hanley titled "Memory of Unknown Relatives." Knibb, whose collection includes works by Uta Barth, Delia Brown, Miles Coolidge, Katie Grinnan, Sean Landers and Henry Taylor, is collaborating with ACME in L.A. to introduce new artists to the area. For more info, see www.1522gallery.com

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