January 2005 Archive

Monday morning funnie

I’ve been meaning to tell you about Scott Bateman for a while. He’s a left coast artist, designer and syndicated editorial cartoonist who publishes a new round of sketchbook material regularly. The sketches are minimalist (bodies floating, some up, some down) but they go nicely with the words which can be very funny, smart and politically punchy. He’s got a pretty deep website with an online journal, some editorial cartoons and other material. Nicely laid out, it’s an ambitious site and an ambitious body of work. I scrolled down quickly in Scott’s latest sketchbook and smiled here and chuckled there, ... More » »

Neil Jenney

Cynthia King of Fresh Paint wrote to say the name of the “Atmosphere” painter I was looking for was Neil Jenney. (We knew that of course) Cynthia has a nice post praising the installation of contemporary art at MAM and narrating the interactions between the pieces. Thanks, too to the other smart kid, Chris Ashley, who also wrote to us about Jenney. Chris, by the way, is a Berkeley-based web-savvy artist, blogger, educator and helpful person who once upon a time, when our artblog was green, gave Libby and me crucial HTML advice to make our blog more beautiful. We ... More » »

Geographic destiny

Why, I asked myself, was I so enjoying the show inspired by the Lewis and Clark expedition at the galleries atMoore College? After all, it had a lot of realistic landscapes, which I’m always griping about. Actually, it took me a little bit of time to get into the landscapes in the show. But this show, which was curated by Curator of Contemporary Art Rock Hushka at the Tacoma Art Museum, is a show of ideas, and the landscapes are so much more than just pretty scenes. In the context of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it’s a show about ... More » »

Museum mission impossible

Why is it the MAM has such a great contemporary art collection in spacious galleries and the PMA’s seems puny — and crammed into two comparatively tiny rooms and a hallway or two? I’ve been stewing about this for days since my trip. If you’ve been to the PMA contemporary galleries, you know what’s there, a small sampling of the big boys — Robert Gober, Jeff Wall, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, Sol LeWitt, Warhol, Sigmar Polke. And I know that’s the tip of the PMA collection iceberg and it’s not fair to compare but somehow I feel a ... More » »

Art in America fire sale!

Did I mention that I dropped my subscription to the magazine? What with all the reading I do online and all the looking I do in the real world I hadn’t been looking at my AIA copies except to thumb through them (obits, news and bob reviews mostly) for about a year. I’m a long-time subscriber (1991) and it was a big step. But we get the New Yorker (readable and thoughtful reviews, mostly NY oriented) and the New York Review of Books (readable and thoughtful reviews of idiosyncratic shows, mostly NY oriented) and in the cyber world I read ... More » »

Snow, Fresh Paint and History

I left Milwaukee and came home to Philadelphia and it looked pretty much like Milwaukee. (image is the 12-inch snow blanket in Milwaukee last Saturday.) Anyway, I wanted to yak a little more about the past — like the past of American art in a show I saw at MAM. But before I do, I’ll make this right turn detour to mention a Chicago artist and blogger, Cynthia King, whose Fresh Paint blog is a snappy, opinionated site about art in Chicago…and Milwaukee! Yes, Cynthia has been all over the Calatrava and MAM and is also an enthusiast. Read her ... More » »

Matthew Ronay at PAFA

Feeling beaten down by so much academy-style art, lately, I pointed my nose toward the Matthew Ronay talk at the place that specializes in all that academy-style art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (here’s my post on the series of upcoming artists’ talks there). Ronay was one of the artists at the Whitney Biennial this year, and you didn’t hear anything about him from either Roberta or me because neither one of us was too crazy about his installation, “’70s Funk Concert Model” (left). Nonetheless, I was yearning for something hip and New York and NEWWW after all ... More » »

WHYY calling

I got an email from Joel Rose, WHYY’s arts and culture reporter earlier today asking if we could talk about the Mark Nash curated video extravaganza, “Experiments with Truth,” that’s at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. See Libby’s post and my post and my PW review for more on that show. (image is from Zarina Bhimji’s piece in that show.) Rose is putting together a story for the radio station that’ll air tomorrow morning on the local part of Morning Edition at 6:33 a.m. and again at 8:33 a.m. (Here’s the WHYY schedule — click Morning Edition for more.) We ... More » »

Staying afloat

After reading Roberta’s post about how the Colatrava addition saddled the Milwaukee Art Museum with an enormous debt, I started thinking about the Barnes’ building costs and then the Bellevue (WA) art museum’s sorry fate. I have no new information. Just free-floating worry. Anyone out there with knowledge of these projects and how these things tend to turn out, please write in and share.

Portraits of the artists

I was looking at two shows of painters with fine academic technique–Tina Newberry at Schmidt-Dean Gallery and Christopher Gallego at Seraphin (left, Newberry’s “Help (the badge),” 10 1/2″ x 11″). I’m not so interested in the differences in how they apply paint–Gallego’s brush work is juicier and freer, Newberry’s nearly invisible. But its the other decisions that make these two bodies of work stand in relief from eachother. What you get from Gallego are mostly literal views, sometimes surprisingly large canvases of the objects in his studio, beautifully painted. The choice of a pair of rubber gloves, hanging over the ... More » »